During a two-hour event on Thursday, IoT developers at AWS re:Invent will get a chance to use DeepLens cameras connected to a private LTE network supported by Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).
The demo at Amazon’s shindig in Las Vegas this week serves several purposes, including showing the simplicity of creating Industrial IoT applications using the cloud and giving enterprises an idea of how they can use CBRS for a private LTE network.
About 100 developers have been invited to participate, and each of them will get to use a DeepLens device, which was built by Amazon with special facial and image recognition capabilities. The devices will connect to band 48-compatible modems over CBRS, which is the 3.5 GHz band in the U.S. Organizers say CBRS was the perfect choice to connect a large number of cameras in a single room without impacting throughput.
Federated Wireless is providing the spectrum controller, enabling access to the CBRS shared spectrum. AWS is providing the cloud IoT platform—Amazon also offers a range of IoT services.
The Athonet BubbleCloud EPC platform on AWS allows users to deploy LTE networks with simplicity—it provides local “bubbles” or blankets of LTE coverage that are connected and controlled from the AWS Cloud. And Ruckus Networks provides its FCC-certified LTE portfolio.
RELATED: Editor’s Corner—Despite controversy over PALs, CBRS is poised for commercial takeoff
One of the themes that is talked about in the CBRS ecosystem is how easy CBRS will make it for enterprises to deploy their own private LTE networks. Some companies even demonstrated it at a race track back in 2017. But handsets that support CBRS in the U.S. are not going to be available immediately, and the AWS event organizers wanted to show people what they could do with CBRS without handsets. They’ve also been working on the Industrial IoT ecosystem.
The disruption here is the application creation—the speed, simplicity and cost reduction of creating IoT applications on top of CBRS, according to Iyad Tarazi, president and CEO of Federated Wireless. In the two-hour workshop, IoT developers can create their own IoT applications on top of CBRS—something enabled by the cloud model and AWS. That’s not how IoT applications traditionally have been created, where it would take weeks or months to get it all together.
The news about the demo at AWS re:Invent came a day after IEEE Spectrum reported on an application for an experimental permit using CBRS that was filed last week with the FCC. According to the report, a company called Chrome Enterprises sought permission to test up to 450 prototype devices using CBRS at three California sites, but the geographies listed in the application line up to include nearby Amazon facilities, leading to the conclusion that Amazon is actually the entity that is seeking to do the tests.