Private 5G Specialist Celona Extends Neutral Host Service To Enterprise AT&T Users
Partners can layer on Celona’s Neutral Host solution with AT&T public cellular network services for private 4G and 5G connectivity for their enterprise customers across a variety of verticals, including healthcare, higher education and retail, the company told CRN.
Private wireless provider Celona has expanded its Neutral Host offering to extend public cellular coverage indoors with private 5G on telecom giant AT&T’s network, the two companies announced Wednesday.
Celona’s Neutral Host offering, which is already certified for use with T-Mobile’s network, can now be extended to millions of AT&T subscribers within the walls of an enterprise, Celona’s co-founder and CTO, Mehmet Yavuz, told CRN.
Channel partners already specializing in Wi-Fi will be able to easily and quickly add on the Celona Neutral Host solution with AT&T public cellular network services for private 4G and 5G connectivity, instead of using repeaters or legacy Distributed Antenna System (DAS) technology, which can be complicated, expensive and can suffer from performance issues due to limited capacity, Yavuz said.
“Now generally available with AT&T, we are ramping up our deployments across different market segments, [such as] healthcare, industrial, retail, and higher education,” he said. “We’re really excited about the fact that our solution is the only 4G, 5G-capable, all-in-one architecture that supports both technologies and that really differentiates us from anyone else.”
[Related: Partners Are ‘Big Believers’ In Private 5G Powering AI, Edge Apps]
The Celona Neutral Host service, which was launched last year, lets any device, such as smartphones and tablets with SIM cards from T-Mobile and now AT&T automatically detect, authenticate and connect to the Celona 4G and 5G LAN over the CBRS spectrum. Users’ data and voice sessions are routed to the respective mobile operator networks and the service appears exactly like each carrier’s regular public cellular services, according to Campbell, Calif.-based Celona.
Meanwhile, on the backend, the neutral host service is based on Celona’s cloud-based Multi Operator Exchange (MOXN) that creates a secure tunnel to the operator public network, Yavuz said.
Celona Neutral Host can be deployed and operational in two weeks and at a much lower cost compared to legacy DAS. Enterprise IT administrators or their partners can manage the service, which is offered in flexible deployment and pricing options. Neutral Host can be enabled on existing Celona private wireless networks or deployed as a standalone solution for neutral host only services, the company said.
Channel partners that specialize in Wi-Fi and are familiar with Celona’s technology won’t need to have the same technical skills to deploy Neutral Host that’s needed to deploy DAS for their customers with Celona’s offering, Yavuz said.
“For them, this is like a big enabler, because so far, private 5G has been in industrial spaces. Suddenly, our partners are saying: ‘Oh, now I can go to retail and I can go to healthcare.’ This opens it up to many verticals,” he said.
Celona now has achieved the certification of its 5G LAN solution with AT&T after completing series of rigorous interoperability and regulatory test cases in the AT&T lab, including Enhanced 911 (E911) calling, and other vital subscriber services, the company said.
Working with AT&T will help Celona accelerate in the market with its Neutral Host service, Yavuz said.
The first live production trial with Celona and AT&T was with Stanford Health Care. A channel partner was involved in the deployment and Stanford has noticed “significant” connectivity improvements, Yavuz said.
Celona is working to extend its Neutral Host service across more United States-based carriers, as well as globally as early as later this year, he said.
Private 5G has the potential to become a significant enterprise networking segment, similar to the now table stakes Wi-Fi market, especially as companies deploy more AI application and edge AI use cases, Rajeev Shah, Celona’s co-founder and CEO told CRN in January.
Late last month, networking provider Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) announced that it was teaming up with Celona to extend its LAN and WLAN portfolio to include enterprise-grade 5G, the two companies told CRN.
