Wireless Startup Celona Unveils Globally Available Private 5G Networking Portfolio

‘What’s exciting is we think we are now pretty much the only company that can meet an enterprise’s needs anywhere in the world with a true enterprise private network architecture,’ Celona’s CEO tells CRN.

Private wireless provider Celona is going global with a portfolio of new private 5G offerings for the enterprise.

The upstart has been disrupting the private cellular networking space for the last three years in the United States, but now it’s unveiling a suite of indoor and outdoor 5G New Radio (NR) products for both U.S. and global markets, Celona revealed on Tuesday.

Enterprises and “uncarpeted enterprise” spaces using Celona’s technology can quickly integrate private 5G within existing IT and wireless infrastructures, Rajeev Shah, co-founder and CEO of Celona, told CRN ahead of Mobile World Congress.

“Private LTE and private 5G is filling a pretty big gap and fundamentally solving connectivity problems where Wi-Fi can’t reach,” Shah said. “And businesses really want a private 5G strategy that scales with them globally.”

[Related: Startup Celona Launches ‘Fanatics’ Channel Program: Exclusive]

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said that its expansion gives enterprises around the world access to a standards-based 5G LAN architecture that provides performance, reliability, and security of private wireless technology, all within one platform. This makes it simple for businesses to build their own private 5G networks capable of aggregate speeds of up to 750Mbps with latency rates of 20 milliseconds or less.

Celona’s 5G LAN architecture combines direct enterprise network integration, zero touch QoS enforcement and integrated security with an open ecosystem of Celona-certified 5G devices, the company said.

Private 5G networking will make some enterprise use cases a reality for the first time, including high-definition video surveillance and smart manufacturing.

For Celona partner STEP CG, private networking is a part of every customer conversation, according to CEO Ed Walton.

Fast-growing MSP StepCG has built out a robust private networking practice and has been deploying private cellular networks for its enterprise customers and integrating that technology with traditional wired and wireless infrastructure. Private cellular, Walton said, “is a big market that’s only getting bigger.”

Because of Celona’s deep bench of expertise and experience in enterprise networking, the startup “gets” these kinds of customer environments and the needs of these businesses, Walton said. “Private cellular should be nothing more than another form of wireless. Traditional Wi-Fi and private cellular -- the enterprise now need both. Celona understands that and is blazing the trail with some new features too, like network slicing,” he said.

Walton said that with Celona’s new 5G NR releases, the company is continuing to make it easier for enterprises to deploy private cellular at the right price point.

Celona’s global expansion means that the company is supporting both public and private spectrum requirements across a wide range of international 5G NR bands, from 3.3 to 4.9 GHz. This expansion lets customers use the company’s private 5G platform across their global facilities to support new high bandwidth applications, Celona’s Shah said.

The New Private 5G Products

Celona’s latest private 5G product components include the Celona 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). All Celona’s private 5G access points support 2x2 MIMO operation and channel bandwidths up to100 MHz across range on international 5G NR bands. The three new access points include the indoor AP-20, which offers both 4G and 5G connectivity concurrently in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band, solving the problem that businesses are running into because many cellular technologies are not backwards compatible, Shah said. “Customers can migrate to these technologies at their own pace,” he added.

Celona is also introducing the 5G only indoor AP-22 and the industrial integrated 5G outdoor AP-21.

The next offering is the Celona Converged Edge which gives enterprises the core and control plane services required for an enterprise-ready private mobile network, including a converged 4G/5G private wireless core with a unified cloud-native 4G/5G data plane and an ORAN compliant RAN intelligent controller service for enterprise use-cases. These services are integrated with a Kubernetes-based orchestration engine for complex deployment models, the company said.

Lastly, the Celona Orchestrator is a cloud-based AI-Ops platform for the remote installation of Celona’s access points and Edge software across multiple enterprise sites.

Celona said that the new offerings are available now through its channel partners. All components of Celona’s 5G private wireless platform are sold on a single software-as-a-service license, with three- and five-year subscription options.

“What’s exciting with these products is we think we are now pretty much the only company that can meet an enterprise’s needs anywhere in the world with a true enterprise private network architecture,” Shah said.

Channel-friendly Celona, in addition to its solution provider and MSP partners, has strategic partnerships with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, as well as Cradlepoint and Verizon.