According to Rob Cerbone, VP of product management and marketing at Communication Technology Services (CTS), the company have been trending towards selling connectivity services directly to enterprise customers, and as a result, has expanded its portfolio so it can provide full signal sources without the carriers.
“The enterprise has to now […] take control of their own destiny for in-building coverage,” Cerbone told RCR Wireless News, adding that CTS thinks a private network will provide these customers with the best balance between reliability of a wired connection and the flexibility of wireless from an operational perspective.
“There’s a lot of noise in the industry with 5G, and enterprises are confused,” he continued, “What we are doing is putting the customer in control of the network; they can define their rules and control their data.”
Today, CTS is offering private LTE networks because the equipment that’s available in the spectrum band they are using is primarily 4G or LTE equipment.
“There is a tremendous opportunity today for an enterprise to deploy a 4G LTE private network,” Cerbone stated. “A lot of things we’re doing today are leveraging principals that are coming with 5G.”
Specifically, Cerbone explained how the growing emphasis on edge computing in 5G is already being address is how CTS deploys a 4G private network.
“Carriers […] are trying to push the network closer and closer to the enterprise so they can get better performance,” he continued. “When we’re deploying a private network, we actually put an edge compute resource on site, so we’re already doing that. Even though it’s not 5G, we’re getting very high performance and low latency.”
Further, Cerbone spoke of another thing the company is doing that is “5G-like,” which is the ability to allocate network resources to different applications or user groups to optimize the performance of the network across the enterprise. This, of course, is akin to network slicing, a capability often highlighted when discussing 5G.
“[Private] networks are like a Swiss Army Knife,” stated Cerbone. “It’s like trying to find the tools on the knife that are going to be best for you: do you want a bottle opener, a nail file?”
CBRS spectrum is central to CTS’ private LTE play. The company is creating a showroom of CBRS/PLTE networks at its technology center in Phoenix, Arizona, and has completed several CBRS/PLTE designs using iBWave and RanPlan.
