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Celona Drives New Changes to Cellular Standards

NEWS RELEASE

CELONA DRIVES NEW CHANGES TO CELLULAR STANDARDS TO AUTOMATE ROAMING WITHIN PRIVATE ENTERPRISE MOBILE NETWORKS

Geofencing enhancements will improve device performance, improve security, and streamline operations for enterprise private cellular networks

CUPERTINO, Calif., Dec. 09, 2021 -- Celona, the leading innovator of 5G LAN solutions, today announced that it has proposed new cellular specifications for 4G and 5G cellular standards expected to be adopted by the OnGo Alliance. These new specifications automate wireless roaming within private mobile networks using advanced geofencing techniques that enable a seamless user experience and improve battery life on mobile devices while protecting them from connecting to invalid private cellular networks.


The technical contributions were submitted to the network services task group at the OnGo Alliance for its Release 5 OnGo specification. This technical specification for the geofencing features is expected to be applied in 2022 for user equipment and devices implementing the emerging 4G/5G private mobile networking 3GPP standards.

“The goal for our proposal was simple: enhance the existing 4G/5G protocol framework with enterprise geofence information to remove any friction users may experience when automatically roaming between private enterprise cellular networks,” said Mehmet Yavuz, co-founder and CTO of Celona.

Mobile devices vendors are currently testing the new geofencing capabilities within their products. The new cellular enhancements combine GPS coordinates, macro network RF footprints, tracking area codes, and network identifier data to inform end-users’ devices about the perimeter boundaries of geographically dispersed private cellular networks for which they have valid credentials.

This information enables user devices to seamlessly roam within different private enterprise mobile networks operated by the same organization and improve the performance and battery life of their devices.

“While public cellular networks have independent system identifiers that allow mobile handsets to discern different networks, private mobile networks really don’t. This makes it difficult for users with credentials to multiple private cellular networks to seamlessly roam between them, and this proposal fixes that,” said Srinivasan Balasubramanian, Distinguished member of technical staff, CTO Office, Celona and lead author of the standards specification.

HOW IT ALL WORKS

Today, private mobile networks use common network identifiers to allow device access. This approach can lead to a denial of service when users attempt to access specific networks without valid credentials and then go back to another network with valid credentials.

The standard changes combine the use of GPS coordinates, network identifiers (NIDs), and tracking area codes (TACs) that are broadcasted by the network. This effectively creates a geofence that mobile handsets can use to more efficiently scan for valid networks that users can access while helping to reduce battery drain on mobile devices.

Consequently, mobile handsets can now make more intelligent connection decisions by understanding if a valid network to which they are authorized to connect is nearby. End-user mobile devices leverage the underlying modem technologies and realize the geofencing with an over-the-top implementation.

Celona’s approach also enables the mobile handsets to have multiple enterprise credentials and dynamically associate with multiple campuses without user intervention– putting mobile handset policy management into the hands of enterprise IT teams.

With the ability to push policies based on network and location to private mobile subscribers, enterprises benefit by ensuring that business-critical applications get preferred access to faster and more reliable Private 5G/LTE networks where quality of service (QoS) can be guaranteed.

For more information, visit the OnGo Alliance to download the publicly available technical report on the specification changes.

Celona Media Contact: Jay Nichols, Nichols Communications, jay@nicholscomm.com

Celona Company Contact: David Callisch, Celona, david.callisch@celona.io