Celona Private 5G Aims Its 'Arrows' at Nokia's Massive Market Share

Celona expanded its enterprise private wireless platform with 5G-specific updates that the vendor said position it as a viable enterprise alternative in a growing market, particularly against market heavyweight Nokia.

Celona expanded its enterprise private wireless platform with 5G-specific updates that the vendor said position it as a viable enterprise alternative in a growing market, particularly against market heavyweight Nokia.

Puneet Shetty, VP of product marketing at Celona, explained the updates add 5G features to the vendor’s legacy 4G LTE-based private network platform. This includes a new 5G access point that supports a deeper pool of spectrum resources; the vendor’s Converged Edge product that provides core and control plane services; and a cloud-based orchestrator that supports remote installation of access points and the edge software.

The access point includes support for spectrum channel bandwidths as wide as 100 megahertz, includes an antenna design to support 2×2 multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) transmissions, and has concurrent multi-mode support for 4G and 5G.

Shetty noted the architecture can support spectrum between the 3.3 GHz and 4.9 GHz bands. This includes the n48 spectrum band that runs from 3.55 GHz to 3.7 GHz, also known as the quasi-licensed Citizen Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) used in the United States; and the n77 spectrum band at 3.7 GHz and the n78 spectrum band at 3.5 GHz that are used in different parts of Europe. He added that Celona later this year would be adding n79 band support in the 4.7 GHz band that is used in parts of Asia.

The Converged Edge product includes a converged 4G LTE and 5G private wireless core developed by Celona that also includes a unified cloud-native 4G/5G data plane and an open radio access network (ORAN)-compliant RAN intelligent controller (RIC) targeted at enterprise use cases. These services are tied to a Kubernetes-based orchestration engine that can manage redundant clusters and service slicing.

The Celona Orchestrator also supports provisioning of Celona SIM cards and eSIMs tied to enterprise access control policies within the network. Celona last year launched a device certification program for SIM and eSIM that included initial certification for devices from vendors like Apple, Google, and Cradlepoint.

This converged system can be purchased directly from Celona and operated by an enterprise or through a management layer delivered through an as-a-service model.

“The ability to take this system and integrate that into an existing enterprise network … the ability to actually plug into the existing security and policy framework, whether it’s firewall, whether it’s [network access control], and being able to use those to continue driving the [zero-trust network access] or security policies that you want all the way down to the cellular devices, being able to actually deliver this predictable [quality of service] to every single device, every single application using what we call internally MicroSlicing, and also providing that kind of converged operational view to the orchestrator, that allows the ability for the enterprise to do it themselves or a [managed service provider],” Shetty said.

All components of the Celona 5G private wireless system are being offered as a single software-as-a-service license with three- and five-year subscription options. This includes the Celona indoor and outdoor access points, the Spectrum Access System (SAS) license for using CBRS spectrum if needed, the edge software, SIM cards or eSIM, the orchestrator management system, technical support, and hardware warranties.

Pricing begins at $17,000 for a three-year subscription tied to an indoor access point or $57,500 for a three-year subscription tied to an outdoor access point.