Building the 5G Foundation – Enterprise Private Mobility-as-a-Service

Progressive enterprises are pursuing software-defined solutions with operating models powered by analytics, automation and machine communications to improve productivity, service-levels and cost structures. With hundreds of devices and sensors connecting to a network, wired connections are becoming expensive. At the same time, the mobile networks are not ready for the massive connections and the data associated with these connections coming their way.

Using conventional unlicensed methods such as Wi-Fi to address the coverage and capacity is not necessarily ideal for some mission critical workloads.  This is because:

• Wi-Fi is designed as a “best effort” service, it cannot deliver the Quality of Service (QoS) to the level most large-scale companies demand.
• It requires significant security to be added to the solution – a big concern for healthcare facilities and other mission critical enterprise companies that have the strictest security needs
• Wi-Fi has limited mobility and the build out of the network has significant CAPEX and OPEX costs

Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) will be a key catalyst and enabler for private mobility for two main reasons:

1. Unlike Wi-Fi, it uses a licensed wireless band and LTE technology to enable guaranteed service levels for the enterprise.
2. The Enterprise can choose to deploy CBRS enabled private Mobility-as-a-Service. Many cloud service providers/wireless ISPs are building out a subscription-based model and therefore, the data rate costs are close to zero and the deployment of the service is faster and sometimes less expensive than Wi-Fi.

This is great news since CBRS will increase the adoption of 4G spectrum within the enterprise and paves the way for 5G. Earlier this month, the CBRS Alliance said it had begun work on a new release to merge with the 3GPP specification for 5G deployments.

We are working with Ruckus Networks (now CommScope via acquisition) to enable massive adoption of mobile edge solutions that will be leveraging CBRS bands in 4G today and will become the foundational blocks for 5G within the enterprise. Ruckus Networks has the core components for private mobility on a public cloud infrastructure, which includes the pre-provisioned SIMs, zero-touch provisioning capabilities and self-service tools for the enterprise.    The combined strengths of mobile access by Ruckus Networks and secure customer edge infrastructure by Dell Technologies enables the enterprise transformation plan.

Key Requirements for the Enterprise

While there are many important success factors to be considered for enterprise rollouts, the following key requirements are essential to ensure that while 4G is being deployed today, the principles of 5G and its foundational blocks are taken into consideration.

1. The need is for a faster, more reliable network that has low latency and most importantly, is private (secure) so data is not shared across the public network.  Wi-Fi isn’t always the most secure service, which can be a concern for any business where it is crucial to keep customers information and data private.
2. The network should be designed for capacity, quality of service and guaranteed service levels.
3. The workloads must reside locally within the enterprise and be orchestrated from a managed service cloud data center.
4. Regardless of consumption model (on-prem, cloud, hybrid) – the operations must be seamless across technology platforms, locations and administrative domains.

Private Mobility-as-a-Service is a Key Enabler for the Enterprise

Some of the key values extended by private Mobility as-a-Service utilizing CBRS bands are as follows.

• Enhanced reliability: More reliable than Wi-Fi for business-critical communications, private Mobility-as-a-Service uses CBRS spectrum to guarantee low latency with a managed SLA model.
• Flexible licensing model: This solution is a subscription SaaS model where the service orchestration, subscriber provisioning, and dynamic spectrum allocation for the access points are all pre-built into the solution for the enterprise.
• Ubiquity: Given the architectural overlap between SD-WAN and private Mobility as-a-Service, the solution can coexist with the broad SD-WAN deployments.