Simplifying Adoption of Private LTE/5G

This article was first published on LinkedIn.

During the month of October, I had the pleasure of hosting our first webinar series on “Enterprise Cellular on CBRS” with our CTO, Dr. Mehmet Yavuz. He brought his considerable expertise and experience in cellular systems to present an overview of the cellular CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) technology, as it applies to deployment of LTE and 5G technology within the enterprise.

Mehmet’s expertise in both cellular as VP at Qualcomm and enterprise as CTO of Ruckus, provided valuable insights into enterprise cellular adoption, including spectrum regulations and operational requirements, technical benefits of LTE and 5G protocols, business application use-cases, and consumption models. Attendees were also active participants throughout the webinar, responding to poll questions, contributing to great discussion on the chat board, and submitting questions for Mehmet during the Q&A section.

I would like to highlight one interesting discussion topic that Celona and attendees discussed during the webinar. We asked the following poll question to attendees:

The results have provided great insight for our team to understand what enterprises need when considering private LTE and 5G solutions:

Architectural Simplicity 38%
Enterprise Network Compatibility 33%
Privacy and Control of Data 13%
Cost Effectiveness 13%
Other 4%

Respondents have indicated that architectural simplicity and enterprise network compatibility are the most important requirements when considering adoption of enterprise cellular. Enterprises require integration with their existing networks and systems as a core requirement, including leveraging existing investments in cable plant, switching and routing infrastructure, network architecture (VLANs, VxLANs, routing topology), policy controls (identity management, directory services, AAA), and security solutions (firewalls, IDS/IPS, NAC, web filtering). This simplifies adoption, allows for mature and familiar tools in the enterprise to extend to a cellular access network, provides consistency across the organization from an operational standpoint and eases security compliance initiatives.

However, there is a disconnect between this fundamental requirement and how today’s private LTE networks are designed and deployed. Today, they require installation and ownership of a completely separate physical infrastructure in parallel to the existing network infrastructure in the enterprise. In addition, deploying an Evolved Packet Core (EPC) comprised of multiple functions that are separately sold, packaged, and require integration creates tremendous complexity.

The end result is that cellular deployment in an enterprise environment is complex, costly, and often not realistically achievable to integrate into existing enterprise networks and systems for low-latency application performance, policy and security controls, and data privacy. Enterprises require a new approach to cellular network architectures, considerably different than today’s approach.

At Celona, we are working hard to bring a new approach to enterprise cellular through a simplified architecture that integrates with existing enterprise networks and systems. We provide an end-to-end solution in a single package that removes the need to source, deploy, and integrate each Evolved Packet Core (EPC) function as a separate system. The solution scales from campus to branch deployments by delivering a software-driven edge computing platform that is powered by cloud orchestration, management, and application intelligence. Webinar attendees learned about both the technology benefits and the unique Celona architecture and approach.