- Federated Wireless is celebrating a 42-month contract with the DoD valued at over $6 million
- The deployment at a Marine Corps warehouse in Albany, Georgia, uses CBRS – the same technology that CTIA and its members have bashed for being underused
- If it’s good enough for the DoD, it’s probably good enough for a lot of other use cases, eh?
Haters are gonna hate, but CBRS poster child Federated Wireless can take a cue from Tay Tay and just shake it off, having recently been a party to a $6 million+ contract with the U.S. Department of Defense for a commercial private 5G network using CBRS spectrum.
Specifically, the contract is with the Marine Corps Logistics Command (LOGCOM) at its Albany, Georgia, logistics hub, where Federated Wireless and its tech partners — including JMA Wireless, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Shared Spectrum — set up a private 5G network on a pilot basis. That pilot is now turning commercial after a years-long effort to prove its mettle, according to Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi.
“It’s been years in the making,” he told Fierce. “It felt like running a marathon rather than a sprint.”
Tarazi knows all too well what it feels like to run an actual marathon; he’s completed more than a dozen of them. But we digress. Back to the network.
About 100 CBRS radios are deployed in the warehouse, which covers a span of about 1 million square feet. There’s Wi-Fi in the facility as well, but the LOGCOM needed a more robust network to support the latency-sensitive robotics that require high availability and reliability, he said, hence the addition of CBRS. The network provides 40 gigabits per second of wireless capacity, all aimed at improving mission readiness for the United States Marine Corps.
CBRS, which stands for Citizens Broadband Radio Service — note the “C” stands for Citizens and not Carriers — was widely regarded as a “experiment” in spectrum sharing when it was developed 10 years ago. Federated was one of the companies that was instrumental in fostering the CBRS ecosystem. Others involved in those early efforts include Google and Nokia.
But CBRS, which is uses a three-tiered priority system for sharing 150 MHz of spectrum in the middle of the 3 GHz band, came under fire in recent years, mainly by CTIA, the lobbying group for the nation’s biggest wireless carriers. CTIA calls CBRS a failure for being too complex and underused and wants to see more high-power, exclusively licensed spectrum. Its biggest backer arguably is AT&T, going so far as to suggest the whole CBRS ecosystem be moved from its current 3.5 GHz location to the lower 3 GHz part of the band, which is occupied by the U.S. military. More on that proposal here.
Naturally, Federated Wireless doesn’t think moving the whole CBRS shebang is a good idea.
“The cost and practicality of moving all the systems on CBRS somewhere else is just not practical for many, many reasons, one of them being the amount of capital that is already invested by everyone,” Tarazi said. “The capital invested is in the tens of billions, if not more, just to build these networks."
Federated Wireless alone, without considering anyone else in the industry, counts more than 900 different operators, integrators and partners that are using CBRS. Many businesses would lose the ability to operate altogether if they were required to move, he said. The industry is close to reaching 500,000 CBRS sites on air, according to the OnGo Alliance.
Federated didn’t put a lot of effort into responding to AT&T’s proposal because it’s so outlandish.
“It seems more of a thought discussion than a practical discussion, and thought discussions are a dime a dozen in this industry,” Tarazi said.
SNS Telecom & IT expects the DoD to spend, over a five-year period, close to $200 million on private 5G networks operating in CBRS spectrum. However, the vast majority of the DoD’s 5G infrastructure projects are multi-band installations, potentially involving a combination of dedicated spectrum for federal users, CBRS spectrum and mobile operator licensed frequencies, according to Asad Khan, research director at SNS Telecom & IT.
Tarazi said the 5G private network for the LOGCOM in Albany uses CBRS and no other spectrum bands.
Nokia’s private 5G taps CBRS
Outside of China, Nokia is the top private network supplier, according to Dell’Oro Group. Ericsson is behind Huawei and Nokia in the third position for private networking.
Fierce asked Nokia how many private networks it’s deployed thus far in the United States and of those, how many are using CBRS. Nokia’s private wireless CBRS deployments include all kinds of industrial markets, including mining, manufacturing, ports, utility power plants and oil and gas.
At the end of Q3 2024, Nokia had 158 enterprise customers in the U.S., a spokesperson said. (The Finnish vendor typically tallies the number of customers, not networks, because one customer might have more than one network to cover multiple campuses.) Of those, the majority of deployments in the U.S. are using CBRS spectrum, either unlicensed General Authorized Access (GAA) or Priority Access Licenses (PALs), the spokesperson said.
Haters are gonna hate, but it looks like CBRS has some bona fide fans. Maybe nothing to rival the army of Swifties, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.