Verizon Business taps Celona for turn-key 5G private wireless offering

The MWC 2022 event is being held in Barcelona this week, and it would be fair to say that the topic of private wireless perhaps ran away with the show. Verizon Business is one of many companies with a private wireless announcement. Today, Verizon Business said it would offer a new turn-key private networking product in partnership with Celona. The private 5G solution will target all business sizes: small, mid-market and enterprise.

The offering will use Celona plug-and-play ingredients under the Verizon Business brand.

According to Celona VP of Marketing Özer Dondurmacıoğlu, those plug-and-play ingredients include the hardware stack of indoor/outdoor radios, physical SIM cards and appliances to run the 5G core. The ingredients also include the software layer for network management, eSIM capabilities and Celona’s micro-slicing technology for application-level quality of service. 

“That full stack allows an enterprise IT team or managed service provider to deploy their own network pretty quickly,” said Dondurmacıoğlu.

The strategic partnership will also leverage the power of Verizon’s On Site 5G, which the carrier launched in June 2021.

On Site 5G was Verizon’s first foray into a commercially available private 5G offering. It creates custom-designed private networks that have been targeted to U.S. large enterprise and public sector customers, using millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum.

The new turn-key offering from Celona will expand the target market of customers and also be usable on CBRS spectrum.

Dondurmacıoğlu said there a number of different types of devices that can tap CBRS spectrum, and “the mix that we have seen so far can be verticalized.”

For outdoor spaces such as transportation yards, companies are using gateways from vendors such as Cradlepoint and Sierra Wireless to connect video cameras. “If you move that indoors to warehouses, we see Motorola Push-to-Talk and Zebra tablets that connect to CBRS radios,” he said.

In healthcare, Cradlepoint is seeing customers choose Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads.

The business relationship

Verizon and Celona will offer one solution with a common relationship, contract, support center, and implementation team.

“We do have a dedicated team supporting Verizon,” said Celona spokesperson David Callisch “The Verizon Onsite 5G team will bring our capabilities to their end customers when they’re interested. This is a much bigger channel for us going forward.”

Verizon’s mobile edge compute

Verizon has made a lot of news about its partnerships with the big cloud providers to work together in the edge computing space.

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg has noted there are three types of technology that enterprises can use: public mobile edge compute, private edge compute and private 5G networks.

Asked how Celona’s private 5G wireless fits in the mix, Callisch, said, “Our software stack for our platform is cloud-vendor agnostic. Verizon has not indicated they’re going to integrate our solution with any of those [public cloud] platforms. Let’s see if the future brings any joint collaboration.”