Andrea Caldini is vice president of product engineering and development, global network and technology, at Verizon, and has been instrumental in the company’s pursuit of private networks such as its deployments with KPMG in support of healthcare and life sciences, with the Port of Virginia, for smart industry, for the National Football League for field-side communications and for back of house operations at the Formula One Miami Grand Prix event. RCR Wireless News spoke with Caldini on her observations on trends in private networks, where Verizon is seeing demand and for which capabilities, and more.
This second part of the Q&A on private networks focuses on aspects of edge compute, spectrum, sales and capabilities.
This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed. Read the first part of the Q&A with Caldini here.
Do you see higher uptake of private networks in places where Verizon also has edge computing zones? Are people looking to leverage edge as part of private networks?
There’s two aspects. We have our public MEC, where you don’t need to have a private network to support that. But then we have private MEC, and that is specifically set up so that you have your private network, and you have private MEC so that your compute and storage is all local, within the enterprise. Both cases are being used, depending on the use case. Some of the ones where we were looking at the stores, we work with iFi those are using public MEC and they also have a private MEC in case something happens where they can’t get out to the public MEC, they can still run on private MEC within the location. When you look at an XR type of solution, you could do it either way, but having it in the private MEC, having that use case local is super helpful. With those experiences, you need to not have to have a backpack or have everything on the goggles; it’s really offloading the compute onto an edge.
How are you approaching sales on private networks? Are your sales teams approaching existing customers, are there requests coming in through system integrators—what is the sales strategy?
It’s all of the above. If you look at Verizon, we work with all of the Fortune 500 companies, we have some type of footprint in there. We have a large sales organization on our enterprise side [and a team] that is responsible for private networks, private and public MEC and IoT, these all kind of come together. The people that we’re talking to in a business might be different than traditional [contacts]. It’s not necessarily the IT folks that you’re talking to, you’re talking to the operations team, because it’s their responsibility to have things running. So we’re really talking to different people within the business organization and then bridging that over to IT teams. Because … IT teams don’t necessarily know wireless; they know Wi-Fi, but they don’t necessarily know wireless. So there’s some education there as well. And it has to be a [sales] ecosystem—we work really closely with different SIs, ISVs, the partnerships we have with them. We might bring them into an opportunity, or they might bring us into an opportunity. [And it’s focused on] the outcome that they’re looking for, not 5G; the challenges in their business and the outcomes that they’re looking for, and … that smaller use case that we can expand on.
How are companies handling the private network core? Are they asking for a managed service, are they trying to manage it themselves?
Managed solutions. They have access to it, they can see it, but it’s really a managed service—especially when it’s our spectrum, because how it works inside and then how it plays outside is very important for a user who maybe is starting within the network, or maybe is visiting the company. We want to make sure that customer is having a good experience as they come in and outside.
Private networks have the potential to have features that are not implemented on the public network. Where would you place private networks in terms of capabilities, are they on-par with the public network or are they going beyond?
At this point, it’s on-par with what you can offer in the public network. When you’re talking about an indoor space and you’re setting up a wireless network to be able to support it, you know what the capacity need is and you know what the user needs are, and then having that spectrum—again, depending on the speeds and what they need—you either need to have a millimeter-wave or C-Band spectrum. Not all spectrum is the same. Our 700 MHz holdings, we have 10-20 megahertz of spectrum there. If you look at what we have in C-Band, in some cases we have up to 200 megahertz. … For me, (because in my previous position I ran the East Coast network and was building 5G) the amount of spectrum we have is mind-blowing. In millimeter wave, we have a thousand megahertz of spectrum. It’s just killer spectrum. And if you think of an indoor solution, where I’m thinking of a company, and you’re not going to have 100,000 people coming on to that spectrum and you’re going to be using it for a certain application, it’s going to be very different. But look at what we were able to do at [the Miami Grand Prix, where Verizon had both public and private networks operating]: That was more [users] than we had at the Super Bowl. … As we’re looking at what a private network can do and what the public network does, it’s the same type of things and we do have to follow standards as well. … But the way that the network is going to be used is very different, just because of the big use cases. Things like network slicing, we will have for both. But how a network slice might look in a private network might look very different than what you would see in public. Nobody has come to me with something that’s so niche that we have to figure out how to build that on a private network—at least, not yet.
Do you have a network-related deployment that you found particularly impressive or exciting?
So I’m dyslexic and so I am a visual learner. When I look at education and the things that we can do in education, it excites me and it excites people whose brain works like my brain. I can’t talk about who the customer was, but it was a specific medical facility, and it was an XR experience where someone was going in and doing training to get certified for a surgical procedure. … Normally, they would have to leave, to go somewhere else and do that certification. To be able to do that at the hospital and not take time out? To me, that was just amazing. So then, I take that to education [overall]. We do have 51 Title I schools that we support with our Innovative Learning, where we give them a curriculum. I was in one in Charlotte, not far from where I live, and these kids created an AR version of something that they were learning. They developed it themselves, they created the storyboards, they put it together and they were showing it to us, and I was asking questions on, if you look at how you learned this versus when you were reading it in a text book, how much more do you remember? … It was so incredible, their excitement for it, their interest and how it stuck with them. And we went back like six months later and I said, ‘Do you remember that story you did?’ It was around learning about seals and their environment. And the kids could tell me exactly everything, because they remembered it so well—because not only did they create it, but they made it come to life. And it was just incredible. So to me, this educational piece of it is something I’m so excited about. … There’s just tremendous potential here.
