The importance of ‘vertical’ domain expertise, obtainable through partnership with industry-specific system integrators, has been a feature of the developing go-to-market strategies of private LTE and 5G players in recent months. It has been the case in Germany, in particular, where the government’s move to liberate the 3.7-3.8 GHz band for localised industrial usage has established the country among the leading venues for private cellular.
Ireland-based Druid Software has followed up a deal with German system integrator Siticom, announced last week, with a parallel arrangement in the home of Industrie 4.0, this time with system integrator Becon. Both firms (stylised in lower case, as siticom and becon) are, in fact, just localised IT specialists, offering cloud and networking as a platform for digital change. Siticom has deals as well with Airspan Networks.
As another proof point, Finnish vendor Nokia has a deal in Germany with system integrator Smart Mobile Labs. But Siticom and Becon are well entrenched among German enterprises, and their strategies to offer cellular demonstrate another feature of the new private networking space: the rapid commoditization and generalisation of out-of-the-box LTE and 5G. Becon has been around for three decades, latterly pushing the local concept up ‘campus networks’ to enterprises.
Becon is offering a software-based private network architecture, under the brand KMU Campusnetz, for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on standalone 5G. It uses Druid’s Raemis core network software platform, which the Irish firm claims integrates 5G-through-2G, plus Wi-Fi devices from any vendor via standardized interfaces. The Becon solution, available as a Wi-Fi-style plug-and-play product, supports LTE and 5G.
The company has offices in the German cities of Berlin, Munich, and Fulda. In Berlin, it is running a 5G test lab, using the Raemis software. The proposition is to offer enterprises a venue to test out use cases and applications, including augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) applications, digital twins, and industrial IoT integration.
A statement from Druid said: “A dedicated campus network can map company-specific network requirements in a highly individualized manner. Be it for remote maintenance of production facilities, communication between machines, control of transport systems, networking of mobile data capturing in logistics or simply for using the typical architectural advantages of bandwidth, latency, network coverage, and data security.”
