AWS recently announced the availability of its Private 5G solution in preview mode. While their announcement was generally welcomed as good news for bolstering the private wireless market, a closer look reveals some disparities we’ve seen with respect to enterprise adoption of the technology.
AWS announcement and their pitch of being a “Turnkey” solution was a validation of what Celona had been preaching and practicing for the last 3-years. Simply put, it was a validation that a la carte solutions that worked perfectly well for public MNOs are not ideally suited for enterprises. Historically, enterprises consume complete network infrastructure solutions and expect to have a high level of control that they typically own and operate.
Since AWS Private 5G solution became public last year, there has been little to no evolution of the product. It continues to be a solution suitable for one-off lab deployments with its single AP per site limit. Yet no true real-world enterprise use case can be addressed with such limitations.
On the face of it, this appears like a turnkey solution but it’s not.
The AWS solution is merely a combination of third party radios combined with a third party core with AWS bringing its management, monitoring & compute stack to help tie the disparate pieces and give this a semblance of a solution.
Support for only a cloud-hosted private mobile core solution significantly limits the target use cases, especially given that the real driver for Private 5G solutions today is latency sensitive applications that are hosted close to the edge of the network.
A strictly cloud-hosted core rules out any possibility of integrating into enterprise’s routing, security & policy infrastructure. This points to AWS Private 5G not being a viable enterprise networking solution, at least not yet.
Moreover, AWS has unveiled an untenable usage pricing model that will quickly stack up even for a small lab deployment. Clearly not much thought has been put into the pricing model. Metered pricing for enterprise-owned private networks means enterprises pay more for increased usage of their own network and their OPEX is completely unpredictable. A good idea?
No.
TCO analysis below clearly shows that AWS private 5G pricing simply does not scale.
So here’s what enterprises can takeaway from the AWS Private 5G announcement
1. Not an enterprise networking solution, only suitable for app developers with limited size lab deployment
2. Untenable & Unpredictable usage-based pricing
3. “Pseudo” Turnkey solution, a combination of multiple disparate 3rd-party &AWS products
And here are important questions that enterprise IT professionals should be asking:
1. How does this scale if I need more than 1 AP per site?
2. How does this integrate with my Enterprise LAN, Security & Policy Infrastructure?
3. How do I support local latency sensitive edge applications on this network?
4. Can I truly take advantage of cellular technology’s guaranteed QoS delivery on a per application per device basis?
5. Am I locked into the AWS ecosystem, or can I use my existing policy and management framework I currently use to manage the rest of my infrastructure?
6. How does solution guarantee SLAs when there is a network glitch, especially with the underlying solution components coming from multiple vendors
THE CELONA ADVANTAGE
Celona has arguably taken a much more enterprise-friendly approach to private 5G from a pricing, deployment, integration, and operational perspective. Affordably priced as an all-inclusive system that is purchased as a 3-year or 5-year software subscription with everything included and with no hidden costs, Celona’s 5G LAN includes all the requisite components needed to own and operate a finely tuned private wireless networks.
Unlike AWS, or any other private wireless solution on the market, Celona uniquely enables the highest levels of traffic management – allowing quality of service requirements, such as explicit packet loss, throughput, and latency requirements to be defined and enforced for each application or device group desired without configuring or touching end user equipment. A real turnkey private wireless LAN solution provides such capabilities.
But it gets better.
Celona’s 5G LAN system integrates directly with existing enterprise IP domain structures, leveraging enterprise IP network services, QoS framework and security postures already in place. All traffic and traffic management is explicitly controlled by enterprise IT staff.
Ultimately, enterprises are looking to embrace private 5G wireless technology as a complement to what they have today and within a familiar framework designed with IT as a forethought, not an afterthought.
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