The small cells form factor is ‘a necessary but not sufficient condition’ for enterprise 5G adoption, says Celona CEO
From Celona’s perspective, enterprise consumption of 5G is how the cellular technology is going to truly be propagated throughout the market. Further, because of the ways in which small cells resemble Wi-Fi access points, the company’s Founder and CEO Rajeev Shah sees this form factor as becoming a popular option for enterprises looking to deploy private cellular networks.
“Small cells are a lot more enterprise-friendly in just the way that they get deployed,” Shah continued. “Indoors, especially, you can use your existing Ethernet cabling; you’re not looking for new fiber to be laid out; they work over IP.” In other words, the deployment of small cells is a “natural extension” of what companies have already invested heavily in, and the management of this infrastructure will closely resemble something that enterprise IT teams are already familiar with.
As a result, Shah believes that while in some cases, an enterprise may also need C-RAN and vRAN architectures as well, small cells will make up the majority of enterprise private network deployments.
However, he added that the small cell form factor is “a necessary but not sufficient condition” for enterprise 5G adoption. “It’s a great starting point, but you need to marry it with an overall architecture that is very IP-based, very IP-friendly,” he explained. “You need to think of the whole end-to-end architecture as something that IT can deploy. If you can put enterprise IP-friendly tech in their hands and small cells happen to be the form factor that takes it, you can now get the scale of Wi-Fi [for cellular].”
To fill in those architecture gaps, Celona has spent the last several years dedicated to solving “the rest of the architecture” beyond the small cell. “Now that we have small cells as form factor, we need to solve the rest of the architecture, whether it’s how networking is done, how security is done, how operations is done,” Shah said.
Market education remains the biggest barrier to 5G enterprise adoption, shared Shah. He added that a close second is the current dearth of real-life use cases. “Over the last 15 months, it’s become very clear that in warehouses, manufacturing plants, large outdoor areas, those use cases are apparent and you will start seeing rapid adoption in those,” he said, adding, though, that for environments like offices, retail stores and hospitals, there is still a lot of growth needed.
Shah is so confident that enterprises will benefit from small cells that he foresees them being the ones to foot the bill. He said that the financial realities of 5G — in which operators have spent billions, and have yet to see substantive ROI in the form of new revenue streams — will “force that model.”
“How do you now do further densification in an environment like that?” Shah asked. “I think the magic answer is for the operators not to be funding this and for the investment structure to change where the enterprises who are actually interested in seeing value out of these networks to fund this and the operators to be able to leverage it for a better customer experience.”
