Philadelphia-based managed private cellular provider Velaspan is targeting enterprises in global markets with Nokia’s private 4G/5G solution. It is the one of the first managed service providers to be authorised by the Finnish vendor as an enterprise solution partner, it said. Velaspan, founded in 2004, is selling both Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) and its Mission Critical Industrial Edge (MXIE) systems, for private networking and edge computing.
The deal follows a parallel one, focused on the US enterprise market, with Nokia rival Celona, signed last August, to offer the same managed private LTE/5G using Celona’s core and radio network solution in the 3.55-3.7 GHz CBRS band. The Celona-based service is being sold with Velaspan’s existing managed Wi-Fi offer.
Velaspan said it is offering an “all-inclusive and fully managed” enterprise 4G/5G service with Nokia that covers 4G/5G network design, L2/L3 network integration and deployment, plus network management. It is targeting customers in the construction, education, healthcare, manufacturing, mining, gas and oil, ports, and retail sectors. It cited the breadth of Nokia’s radio (RAN) portfolio as a driver for its global push, beyond the US CBRS band.
A statement said: “With the agreement with Nokia, Velaspan MPC can deliver services using both CBRS and other worldwide public and private spectrum.” It called the MXIE compute platform the “heart of the system”, available also with remote radio units (RRUs) and the Nokia DAC manager. Private 5G fits for use cases that need “pervasive coverage, seamless mobility… [and] high reliability,” it said.
David Bond, co-founder and partner at Velaspan, said: “Demand is growing with some of our larger customers to offer worldwide Managed Private Cellular services like we currently do for our Wi-Fi-based services. Nokia’s depth of experience with cellular networking brings a full feature set and spectrum support to its solutions that allow Velaspan to deploy its managed private cellular services anywhere.”
Stephan Litjens, vice president of enterprise campus solutions at Nokia, said: “We are delighted to work with Velaspan. By adding Nokia DAC to its portfolio, it will be able to offer a robust, secure, and flexible private cellular network system to provide coverage and scalability enabling their customers to achieve their digital transformation goals.”
