CBRS experts from Google, Samsung and T-Mobile joined Monica Paolini, founder and principal at Senza Fili Consulting, to discuss enterprise uptake of the technology on Day 2 of the FierceWireless E5G event this week.
Fifteen months after the conclusion of the 3.5 GHz auction, the word is out on CBRS, and interest is growing among enterprises and public sector entities.
“A year ago I was scraping for use cases I could present,” remembers Preston Marshall, principal wireless architect at Google and chair of the OnGo Alliance, which is working to commercialize CBRS. “Now we’re having to shave them down because there’s just too many good ones,” said Marshall. “We have created a lot of options that never existed before.”
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Marshall said companies are exploring new business models and various approaches to network economics. They can try to own and operate their RAN, core and edge equipment, or they may choose to pay for some or all of that as a service, he explained.
Marshall also noted the influx of new OnGo Alliance members, which he sees as a function of market demand. Suppliers, many of them relatively small value-added resellers and systems integrators, know they need CBRS as an offering, he said. Integrators are eager to promote their CBRS capabilities; recently Winncom Technologies and Black Box both announced their participation in Nokia’s CBRS partner program.
TJ Maan, senior director, regional service providers and enterprise 5G at Samsung, said CBRS is solving “a lot of outdoor pain points for customers deploying large scale outdoor Wi-Fi networks.” He said CBRS can cover very large areas with “a macro type solution, and provide that connectivity for mobile use cases.”
Luke Lucas, senior manager for T-Mobile 5G smart and indoor coverage, used his company’s layer cake analogy to describe CBRS, saying it can fit in between enterprise Wi-Fi and the public cellular network. He said he works with corporate customers to determine whether CBRS should be part of their network architecture. It’s not a cookie cutter solution, he said, describing it as “prescriptive” to each customer.
Top verticals
Lucas named education, healthcare and logistics as T-Mobile’s most active verticals for CBRS, and said government buyers are starting to emerge. “We have had so many public safety threats across the U.S.; the government is trying to wrestle and tackle that and trying to apply technology to help them,” he said.
Maan said he talks to customers in the manufacturing and warehousing industries, and that Wi-Fi can address many of their needs, but not all. He said robotics and real-time image processing benefit from private cellular, and then the challenge becomes seamless interoperability with Wi-Fi.
5G SA
Marshall explained that a number of enterprise customers are waiting for 5G standalone because they want the “assured performance” provided by end-to-end 5G. “As we see SA becoming more normalized in the operator community it will give enterprise a lot more comfort,” he predicted.
When 5G SA can operate in CBRS, more companies may be ready to invest. “The biggest demand we get in OnGo Alliance is to finish up all the 5G standards, industrial standards for operation in [band] 48 so people can be comfortable with their investment,” Marshall said.