Pioneers in private wireless delivering excellent solutions: Celona

The Silicon Review

After attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, four good friends uncovered a massive opportunity to disrupt the networked world.  And so, Celona was born.  Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Celona is credited with developing the industry’s fully turnkey 5G LAN solution for the enterprise. By leveraging the new shared cellular spectrum being made available worldwide, Celona’s 5G LAN system, for the first time, allows companies to own and operate their own mobile network infrastructure. With Celona’s unique turnkey solution, enterprises and mobile network operators can embed a connectivity thread through the value chain to address the growing demands for more deterministic wireless connectivity and vital use cases not met by conventional wireless alternatives.

Celona is a pioneer and innovator of enterprise private wireless solutions. The company is credited with developing the first turnkey 5G LAN system that enables companies, for the first time, to own and operate their own private wireless infrastructure. Its products and technology help organizations accelerate the adoption of business-critical applications and use cases to support a new generation of Industry 4.0 digital business initiatives. Taking full advantage of new shared cellular spectrum options available across Americas, Europe and Asia, Celona’s unique 5G LAN architecture is engineered to help simplify and automate deployment of cellular wireless technology by enterprise organizations and their technology partners.

The business

Celona is a pioneer of a new class of enterprise wireless solutions to exploit the availability of shared cellular spectrum available for 4G and 5G technology. The company is credited with developing the first enterprise class platform that allows companies to own and operate their own private mobile networks. Celona sells its products directly and indirectly to enterprises around the world through a vast network of premiere channel partners, managed service providers and systems integrators. Celona’s products serve as the foundation for Verizon’s Onsite Private 5G Service and NTT’s P5G offering.

The market opportunity

Celona competes in the growing multi-billion-dollar private wireless market. The company is attacking the most profound development in enterprise wireless since the introduction of Wi-Fi – the availability of new shared cellular spectrum that allows organizations to build private mobile cellular networks without having to purchase costly spectrum licenses or solely depend on public cellular services offered by mobile network operators. Rapid growth of mobility and business essential applications that depend on wireless is driving enterprises to demand more deterministic wireless solutions that address critical performance, reliability security and coverage problems inherent in conventional enterprise wireless. Celona has pioneered a unique software-based 5G LAN architecture that is purpose-built for making 4G/5G wireless technology easily accessible to enterprises at a price that rivals conventional wireless (Wi-Fi) LAN systems.

The solution

Celona’s private 5G platform is the first-of-its kind to tightly integrate network and radio functions with AI orchestration. The solution is the only one that’s ready for integration within any existing enterprise network infrastructure and configuration, significantly accelerating its adoption among enterprise IT professionals. It combines all the components required to enable an IT team to build their own 4G/5G wireless networks in a single package that’s easy to deploy and manage at scale.

The team

Celona has assembled a collection of industry leaders for engineering and technical talent - with backgrounds in the cellular, enterprise wireless and cloud networking markets. Founders have more than 50 years of combined experience with industry-defining companies such as Aruba, Jasper, Qualcomm and Cisco.

AWS Private 5G

AWS recently announced the availability of its Private 5G solution in preview mode. While their announcement was generally welcomed as good news for bolstering the private wireless market, a closer look reveals some disparities we’ve seen with respect to enterprise adoption of the technology. AWS announcement and their pitch of being a “Turnkey” solution was a validation of what Celona had been preaching and practicing for the last 3-years. Simply put, it was a validation that a la carte solutions that worked perfectly well for public MNOs are not ideally suited for enterprises. Historically, enterprises consume complete network infrastructure solutions and expect to have a high level of control that they typically own and operate. Since AWS Private 5G solution became public last year, there has been little to no evolution of the product. It continues to be a solution suitable for one-off lab deployments with its single AP per site limit. Yet no true real-world enterprise use case can be addressed with such limitations.

Celona has arguably taken a much more enterprise-friendly approach to private 5G from a pricing, deployment, integration, and operational perspective. Affordably priced as an all-inclusive system that is purchased as a 3-year or 5-year software subscription with everything included and with no hidden costs, Celona’s 5G LAN includes all the requisite components needed to own and operate a finely tuned private wireless networks. Unlike AWS, or any other private wireless solution on the market, Celona uniquely enables the highest levels of traffic management – allowing quality of service requirements, such as explicit packet loss, throughput, and latency requirements to be defined and enforced for each application or device group desired without configuring or touching end user equipment. A real turnkey private wireless LAN solution provides such capabilities. But it gets better. Celona’s 5G LAN system integrates directly with existing enterprise IP domain structures, leveraging enterprise IP network services, QoS framework and security postures already in place. All traffic and traffic management is explicitly controlled by enterprise IT staff.

Rajeev Shah, CEO