Verizon is growing its roster of private network customers by using a mix of vendors and spectrum to address different use cases. Some of its private network deployments are using licensed spectrum and radios made by traditional network equipment vendors, while others use unlicensed spectrum and new radio suppliers.
The carrier’s partnership with Celona is bearing fruit in Pryor, Oklahoma, where the annual Rocklahoma music festival takes place each Labor Day weekend. As many as 77,000 people have shown up for past Rocklahoma concerts, and Verizon is counting on its recently deployed C-Band spectrum to help provide 5G connectivity for fans during the weekend.
But for the Pryor Creek Music Festival staff running the event, a private LTE network using unlicensed CBRS spectrum will support ticket scanners, tablets and laptops. Jennifer Artley, Verizon SVP of 5G acceleration, said the carrier was able to cover the needs of the 975,000-square-foot facility with two Celona access points, two omnidirectional antennas, and two 65-degree sectorized antennas. The team also connected an onsite Celona full stack 4G/5G core to the festival’s local area network.
Verizon supplied 40 private LTE SIM cards, which are being used in tablets carried by the event’s operations team. The tablets run an app that helps staff manage logistics during the event, which is promoted as “America’s Biggest Labor Day Party.”
The private network uses Cradlepoint routers and CBRS gateways made by BEC Technologies to connect devices that do not support SIM cards. Celona marketing director David Callisch said food and beverage vendors walk around the festival with the BEC gateways attached to their lanyards. The gateways use Wi-Fi to connect to the smartphones and tablets carried by the vendors and use CBRS to backhaul traffic to the private network. Google’s Spectrum Access System mediates users’ access to the frequency band.
Verizon’s Artley said event production companies may pay for a private network and then lease it back to the venue so that other events can use it later. But not all CBRS networks will be site specific. “We recently sold our first multi-site Celona solution,” Artley told Fierce Wireless. She said the carrier has built other private networks with Celona that use more radios and cover areas that are larger than the Pryor concert venue. In Pryor, Verizon and Celona were able to build the network within two months of signing the deal with the music festival.
Artley joined a call with Fierce Wireless just after a meeting with the CEOs of Verizon Business and Celona, and she noted that the two executives discussed plans to continue addressing the private network needs of mid-market companies. “We’re having the most success with Celona in that mid-market space,” she said.
Some larger customers use licensed spectrum
While unlicensed spectrum will often serve the needs of mid-sized companies, and even some large manufacturing firms, other big Verizon customers insist on using licensed spectrum for private networks.
“I think healthcare will use licensed spectrum,” predicted Greg Corlis, principal at KPMG US, the integrator that brought Verizon in as the private network provider for Cleveland Clinic’s new hospital in Mentor, Ohio. Corlis added that healthcare is currently the most active vertical for KPMG’s private networks business and said Verizon and KPMG are talking about solutions with several healthcare providers, including Florida’s Moffitt Cancer Center.
Corlis said healthcare facilities value licensed spectrum for privacy, security and for the guaranteed access. “With CBRS there is always a risk that another enterprise will start using the spectrum,” he explained. Unlike big factories, hospitals tend to be located in busy urban areas where the likelihood of congestion can be high.
Private networks on licensed spectrum may cost more than CBRS networks on unlicensed spectrum, but for enterprise customers costs are relative. Mid-market firms may be comparing private cellular to Wi-Fi, while large enterprises may be comparing it to fiber and Ethernet. Corlis said a wired network at Cleveland Clinic’s new hospital would have cost $9 million, but the private wireless network was $1.5 million.
Cleveland Clinic’s new hospital opened in July and is not yet using its new private network, Corlis said. He added that the facility has a list of 15 potential use cases, including transitioning voice service for staff to the private network. He said the hospital is also talking about a possible multi-access edge compute (MEC) installation so that patient scans and images could be stored closer to the hospital. Currently, it can take more than an hour for a physician to download a patient’s file from the cloud, so storing the images nearby and downloading them via a dedicated 5G network could significantly improve patient outcomes.