‘The launching point is now,’ says Airspan President & COO about private 5G networks
At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona, Airspan’s President & COO Glenn Laxdal urged RCR Wireless News to simply look around the show in order to see the “tremendous amount of innovation” in the area of private networks.
“As you can see at the show, private networks have been pretty pivotal and sort of central to the theme of Mobile World Congress,” he said. “The way Airspan thinks about it is that what 4G was to the consumer, 5G is to the enterprise, and private networks is all about the enterprise.”
Laxdal did acknowledge, however, that the last two years has seen a significant roll out of 4G private networks, along with “some experimentation” when it comes to 5G use cases in the enterprise space, a development that it’s ramping up quite fast thanks to the introduction of Airspan’s “starter kit”, a full 5G standalone Network in a Box.
“But, really we see the next 10 years being about the deployment of broad-based 5G private networks, and as those get rolled out, we’re going to start to see some pretty clever innovation and enterprise software development going on top of those private networks,” continued Laxdal. “I think that the launching point is now.”
Working with an ecosystem of partners that includes Dell, Cisco and Amazon, Airspan, according to Laxdal, is particularly focusing on the radio, the small cell radio, to be exact. “Small radio cells is really what we’re bringing to the 5G table,” he said.
While 5G deployments so far have largely been around macro cells that provide a coverage layer for nationwide 5G, Airspan sees small cell deployment, both inside and outside an enterprise, as the real opportunity for 5G private networks.
Private networks and Open RAN
According to Airspan’s SVP of Technology & Marketing Abel Mayal, part of the company’s private networks play involves addressing the growing interest in Open RAN standards.
He told RCR Wireless News that Open RAN offers the necessary level of deployment flexibility to drive significant value for enterprises. “You can move the software to your private network, you can host on premise, you can put it in the cloud,” he said. “This is a booming market… This is one of the main markets we are going to target as well.”
Looking ahead, Airspan will prioritize establishing additional partnerships in the Open RAN space — adding to those it already has with Amazon, HPE, Dell and Cisco — and focusing on technology scalability. Lastly, he said another feature that will be important for the industry is the interoperability between 5G and Wi-Fi.
FWA in unlicensed spectrum
Another area of innovation for Airspan is fixed wireless access (FWA). Jaime Fink, the company’s VP of Technology, Fixed Wireless and CTO & co-founder of Mimosa Networks — acquired by Airspan in 2018 — was also at MWC Barcelona showcasing the company’s next generation of point-to-multipoint products for broadband and backhaul applications in unlicensed spectrum.
“When people think of 5 GHz or unlicensed, they think ‘unreliable,’” shared Fink. But, the 6 Series introduces several new capabilities, including OFDMA, which provides improved noise mitigation, next-generation massive MIMO techniques and beamforming, as well as the new 6 GHz unlicensed spectrum. All of this, said Fink, will enable wireless technology to enter markets that previously presented a challenge for fixed wireless access deployments, such as those in rural and dense locations.
According to Fink, with these new capabilities, fixed wireless applications can be deployed “at a fraction of the cost with much higher speeds.”
The FWA market is expanding amidst increasing government funding and a growing interest in fiber alternatives, all aiming to hit that gigabit speed, and Fink believes that the industry, for the first time, “can comfortably say we can hit that goal.”
