Jennifer Minella – When and Why Private Cellular is Replacing Wi-Fi

This is texturing TV. Today's topic is obviously about private cellular and how that's replacing. Wi-Fi networks.

I do want to give you a little bit of my background. So I've worked in technology and security for more than 20 years for about the past 15 years or so primarily and the security side, but my background came from Network architecture and the network security so You know long ago and far away. HP triple Master ASE certified Wireless this Wireless that so I've been doing Network architecture for approaching 20 years now Wi-Fi.

So w lands for most of that time as well. I was working with Wi-Fi in the late 90s pre standard and then of course more recently security stuff. So so everything that I'm telling you today related to cellular networks and Wi-Fi comes from you know, 15 years of history in the Enterprise land and Wi-Fi space and I I don't so I'm an advisor.

I don't sell anything. I don't work for a company that sells anything. So this is very vendor-neutral.

I have written a couple of books. I co-wrote low Tech hacking a few years ago. And then just a few weeks ago the wireless security architecture book with Wiley started shipping and that book does also contain some information on private cellular networks among other things as well.

So what we're going to be talking about today is kind of the who what when why where sort of thing right? So my new friend in the back of the room said, okay. I've never I've never heard of this using private cellular as kind of a land inside of an organization.

And so that's kind of this is kind of more of an educational thing to explain how we're doing this why we're doing it when we're doing it. When we're not doing it because sometimes it's not the appropriate thing to use and then I will give you a little bit of information about cellular versus wi-fi simply because I think most of us if we have wireless experience. It's probably on the Wi-Fi side if that's a fair assumption.

And then a little bit of considerations around some of the security programs and practices and zero trust. So if you haven't heard of private Cellular in this type of use case, it's because here in the US that ban from the SCC wasn't opened up until just a couple of years ago. So here's the tweet that they put out in 2020 and so fast forward to you know, two years now.

We're in 2022 this Market has grown exponentially in that time. It's unbelievable. And this is one of the things I have a lot of friends that are analysts with Gartner and forest or they're brilliant.

They're not really on board with this yet. And I think they're wrong. I think all of the major analyst agencies are wrong about private cellular and I'm curious to see when we get done with today kind of what you guys think about that.

So the first thing is the what is private cellular? I think anytime somebody sees the word cellular the first thought in your head of course is a phone right a mobile phone, but really private cellular is that we're going to use has nothing to do with phones. It has nothing.

More to do with phones than Wi-Fi has to do with phones. So all this is is we're using the RF technology from cellular. In a mode like we would a wireless land like Wi-Fi or an iot based 80215 for connection from an RF perspective.

There's some differences in the way these Technologies work that I'll be explaining but think of this as your own private Enterprise Network Just like any other wireless LAN or wired land except for we're using cellular. Ology so this gets a little bit twisty especially here in the United States these first few bullets over here on the right might be things that you've heard or seen an articles. And so sometimes you will see this referenced as private LTE or private 5G you might see it references a private cellular network and sometimes that gets abbreviated as PCN.

You might see something like 5G land. That's kind of the new The new shiny thing, right? So all of those describe the technology those next couple of bullets really just describe the RF frequencies that we're using the Spectrum, right?

4 gigahertz. We use we have five gigahertz and now we have six gigahertz we use in Wi-Fi and that's in the unlicensed Spectrum. With private Cellular in the US they've opened up the cbrs band.

And so yes, that is Citizens Citizen band radio frequencies. 5 gigahertz space. So it sits between what we use for Wi-Fi meaning from an RF perspective.

It's an overlay to other stuff that we're using and it doesn't interfere with that band 48 is just really another name here in the US for the cbrs spectrum that we're using but a lot of times when you're looking at something and kind of not a phone but maybe a laptop because a laptops do support this as well. A lot of times you will you won't see cbrs. You'll see band 48 is one of the radios on there.

So just another way to communicate that The Sim e-sim and dual SIM. So obviously I think everybody's familiar with the SIM. I think probably most of us are familiar with the physical Sim that we've had in phones for a long time.

And so the progression of phones and other devices has been we had a physical stem and then they started doing esim which is an embedded Sim which is kind of a software-based them. And so this is something that's obviously not a physical card we plug in it's just something we sort of program or provision usually over the air. And then dual SIM so our phones a long time ago had that one physical Sim slot.

They progressed at some point. They started having two slots or it might be a physical slot most phones now a physical slot and then there is also in esham where we can have that sort of digital Sim where we can provision several networks on to that. And then the other two bullets at the bottom have to do with the infrastructure components of private cellular.

And so the cellular world is very parallel. There's a lot of lines we can draw from things like Wi-Fi to Cellular but they're called different things. And so what you'll see what we would consider sort of an AP or radios like you see here on the left with the Solona logo and then you see a JMA radio over there on the right.

Those are nodes. You might see them called. I hate that they call them AP.

Sometimes they call them APS. I call them cellular APS and then the enode B and the g node B really just has to do with whether it's LTE or 5G. So evolve node is LTE next gen G 5 G.

And then the packet core is software or Hardware that. For lack of a better parallel for that line to Wi-Fi would be something sort of like a controller. It's where all of the intelligence in this decision-making in that system is happening.

So these kind of cellular apes or these nodes are connected back to a packet core somewhere and that makes all the decision the authentication security. I'm a visual person. And so here's what this looks like.

Now. This graphic is not designed to explain all of the different use cases. We're going to get to that in a second.

It's really just more to kind of let you wrap your brain around what this looks like and that it is very similar to what we do in the world of Wi-Fi. So just like we would have a Wi-Fi AP here. We have a cellular node.

It's connected to a packet core which could be Hardware or software that on the left side here. Is connected to or through usually in Enterprise land and we'll talk about what that can look like. Or it might just go to the internet as sort of an overlay system.

And then over on the right. We have kind of the rainbow of fruit flavors of things we can attach what that looks like right now is I mentioned obviously cell phones. There's Cell phones work with Sims right?

There are a lot of tablets laptops and handheld scanner devices that already support Sam and cbrs Technologies. And again cbrs is specific the band in the US that we're using. The other thing that we have are iot sensors and smart building devices that are also natively supporting cellular Technologies.

We've had those for a while things like cameras security systems. On the top left up here this adapter. So we basically have an assortment of little dongles where we can sort of outfit something that doesn't have a cellular radio in it.

And then on the bottom, right you see that cradle Point down there for cellular back call. So all of these other things are attaching using cellular. And that back home model.

Is that CradlePoint device or whatever I'm using CradlePoint as an example because very common so that sucker is attached to the private cellular network. But then on the back end it's serving Wi-Fi or serving wired ethernet connection. So what does cellular?

As a wland look like so you kind of saw some of the examples of endpoints. There are in addition to those examples that I gave you a lot of specialized Hardware out there a lot of two-way and push to talk communication devices that are using this and I'll explain why in a minute and then the bottom here what you see is follow the ongoing Alliance for more. So I believe for a brief period of time they were called The cbrs Alliance But now on go Alliance is all things private cellular.

It's a Consortium. It's not a it's not a company that sells something but it's a great resource. They have a lot of great information a lot of great technology vendors that are members on the right side is that progression of use cases?

And so Your brains are probably going okay. What what you have to provision a Sim? What does that look like?

So right now where we are is that this technology is most commonly used for these digital transformation projects where there's a specific use case. And again, I'm going to get into some of the technical technical stuff in a minute about why we use this technology instead of something else so digital transformation and then things like critical Communications and safety applications. So those Push to talk things like the campus blue light kiosk when you're walking down the street and you've got have an emergency and there's a little box here you can tap.

So these types of things that are not really Appropriate for us to put on Wi-Fi networks for a variety of different reasons. Now. I kind of have this line about we are here.

There's these emerging use cases. So as the industry starts to kind of feel their way through this because again, this is very new. What we will be getting into is more use cases of fully managed traditional endpoints.

So right the laptops the tablets that you're giving to your employees in an organization. And then that's going to kind of trickle down into things like BYOD users and those endpoints and then we'll get into guests and other managed endpoints. Now the one thing that might happen out of order here, is that guest and other unmanaged endpoints.

might slide its way up a little bit simply because this technology does support neutral host Network architectures. Which means We could use our private infrastructures and we could broadcast we have to enter into an agreement with them and do some stuff, but we can broadcast the public carrier Networks. And those public carrier networks will securely tunnel back through to their own stuff.

So we don't have access to that data. It's purely tunneled between that guest user or person. And that carrier that they're connected to we are just a radio transport for them.

Right? And so as that starts to happen that may move up a little bit and become an earlier use case. So now why why would we use private cellular instead of some other stuff?

Up. I'm going to kind of table and come back around to we get into the cellular versus wi-fi, but for now just understand that the cellular RF. Has far more resilience and quality and availability than a traditional Wi-Fi network or any other iot type Network that we have right now.

And again, I'll explain why in a minute same thing with density and distance. So if you think about cellular technology, obviously, we're not, you know, a few feet or meters away from the cell tower. We're possibly miles away from it.

So that technology is designed to work over a much farther distance. Now when we're using this inside our Enterprise, we don't need it to go for miles. So that is scaled back a little bit, but we do get a lot more dense distance.

We also get more density and that's just because of the way that the cellular RF works. From an authentication standpoint. I think this is interesting.

So One of the common things that I hear from vendors in this space is they'll go out to organizations and they will say oh this is so much more secure than Wi-Fi. We blow Wi-Fi out of the water, etc. Etc.

Well, I mean, I'm obviously a Wi-Fi security specialist. So I'm going to challenge that but what I will say, is that a cellular cellular network including private cellular out of the box is as secure. 1 X Authentication.

And mutual certificate based authentication, right? So if you have provisioned your Wi-Fi network, if you stood up a radius server if you've configured all of your 1X protocols. And you've issued device certificates.

And you've only done that meaning you don't allow other stuff on that Network like macauthentication bypass and stuff like this. Then then you're basically on par from an authentication standpoint and from an encryption standpoint. Now, I'm not going to get into the nitty gritties.

There are some additional things that happen on cellular or don't happen on cellular that do make it a little bit more secure. So for example on cellular we don't have these peer-based zero comp protocols that we would have on a traditional land for Apple bonjour and other md&s so there is a little bit more security from that perspective, but I'm not going to walk around and tell you guys. Oh, this is, you know, 50 times more secure than Wi-Fi.

from a data privacy standpoint if you ask a Cisco and all of the different surveys recently, what they're going to tell you is one of their biggest concerns about 5G public 5G is data privacy because now there's a lot more data passing through somebody else's Network and it's not so much that they're reaching in and you know looking at every little packet and the payload, but it's the aggregate And the metadata and the trending analysis of what that is. So a lot can be derived and a lot of the carriers monetize that and they sell that data. So with a private cellular network.

We're eliminating that or well, we have the opportunity to eliminate it depending on the delivery model, right? We can put that packet core Hardware or software in our own infrastructure. Which means nobody else even has access to it?

LTE the later generations of Lte. And of course 5G support some really interesting splicing and segmentation Technologies. So that does surpass what we can do in Wi-Fi and then some of the vendors further enhance that with their own special sprinkles on it.

So the current use cases this is okay. It's been out for a couple years. Now.

How are people using it? It's very popular right now with. Infrastructures where we have a managed endpoint so the organization owns and manages that endpoint because we need to provision it right.

So we see this a lot in manufacturing and warehouses. There's been the first multi-tenant where they're kind of watching all of the smart building stuff that's going on there. When we get into schools and universities, there's some really crazy stories in here.

I mean just wonderful crazy stories, especially through the pandemic because Cbrs and private networks here in the US and in some places overseas were used as a way to deliver network and internet services out to people's homes. And so there are a lot of economically depressed areas and obviously students in those areas where maybe they can't afford internet at the home. And so this technology we saw that cradle Point picture earlier right with that back call.

So the schools and then sometimes the municipalities were able to send those things out. create an entire private cellular network that blanketed many many square miles thousands of citizens and students and give them in-home internet when they couldn't have it before. Really interesting story and then you'll also see a couple of these campuses where they're using it on campus for iot and other purposes and connectivity.

Municipalities same thing here Colin voice. That's not him. That's the person that wrote this article.

But the City of Tucson CIO has a really amazing almost heart-wrenching story about how he grew up without access to a lot of well anything and he wanted to do the same thing. He wanted to provide his citizens with an opportunity, especially through the pandemic to be able to continue to have access to resources to access to Internet because that's how they were going to find new jobs. That's how they were going to keep working.

That's how they were going to feed their families and it worked. Las Vegas is using this technology to connect cameras and public parks and other iot systems. It's being used for smartlining.

It's being used for water meters all sorts of things. An airports they're using private cbrs in inside the airport. For their own back-end operations and connectivity.

So all of that, you know, the scanners the baggage handling all of that stuff that happens behind the scenes. The problem is is that we'll talk about in a second with Wi-Fi is there's a lot of connectivity challenges with that. So they're using this technology on the back end now to connect all of those things wirelessly same thing with hospitals.

So hospitals originally were kind of popping up cbrs and Tents during the pandemic to get internet do that backhaul thing now, we're looking at biomedical devices and getting that additional availability and reliability from this network. So then it's okay. How does Private cellular delivered and here's where I'll tell you some of the the market in the industry kind of diverge a few different ways.

so from Architecture standpoint. I'm going to start on the right from an architecture standpoint. I'd mentioned that.

This could be a complete overlay. So this could be its own thing that has its own internet connection. It does not connect to the Enterprise land at all.

It's just its own little network over here. So that's one option. The other thing we can do is sort of overlay it with the Enterprise land and we might do something like use a shared internet egress.

And then there's partial integration to the land. So maybe it's connected to the land and we're doing some stuff. In excess of just an internet connection, maybe we're using some limited domain services or we're at least dropping the traffic on the network and then able to switch around it from that from that point on at the packet core and then there's fully integrated to the Enterprise land.

So there are solutions out there that are doing things like fully integrating and dropping and mapping over the air slices onto vlans or other, you know virtualized networks like burfs. Um Dynamic routing Integrations between that packet core and the Enterprise land Integrations with existing radius servers for authorization and policies. So we're getting to the point now where again even though this is new we can put these systems in place and this is evolving pretty quickly where we can fully absorb this into our Enterprise ecosystem or again or not, or do it as an overlay.

So then knowing that those are the architectures these are sort of the delivery models. Obviously we can do fully managed. And that can come in a few different flavors.

It can come from carriers from third parties. What I kind of caution organizations about is if data privacy is a concern if you get into a fully managed. Delivery model, you do have to kind of read that contract very closely about what they have access to from your data and what they can do with that data right from a privacy standpoint in the US were horrible about data privacy for consumers and organizations.

There's also Cloud hosting with consumption-based billing model think Amazon AWS DOT type of thing and then Enterprise managed where? That entire system is sitting inside the organization and your it team is managing it and the systems that are designed for that delivery model that architecture are designed and written from a lake from an interface standpoint to be easy for an IT administrator to do so, you don't need to Cellular expert. You just need somebody.

It's I would say it's the equivalent of like managing Cisco, you know Meraki which is cloud, but you know Cloud managed system or Juniper Mist, which is a cloud-based wi-fi system. So if your it team is comfortable with those Then you're in the ballpark for that. So me into the to the Wi-Fi versus cellular here where I promised I'd dig into a few more little details and let me see if my my pen likes me today.

Okay. Good. Awesome.

So we've already talked. To the distance coverage. I don't think there's probably any questions about that right now.

What I will say is I don't think it's on this chart when we design Wi-Fi. For a signal coverage standpoint we aim for what we call. Around next 65 dbm.

That's just a measurement. It's a ratio measurement of this perceived signal strength for that endpoint. in this particular case It's a negative number which is a little bit weird.

So a higher number which is be less negative is stronger. And a more negative number is a weaker signal so negative 65 is where everything tends to be happy when we get into neg 75 or 80 a more negative number. Our traditional Wi-Fi endpoints just kind of they fall off and they're not happy.

So compare that. with cellular That's an arrow. My drawing is terrible.

I'm so sorry. So with cellular, we're a more for that negative 105 to 115 with that fall off happening around negative 120. So what what I'm saying here, is that a signal strength and Wi-Fi needs to be this good.

A signal strength and cellular only needs to be this good to get the same quality and throughput and that has to do with the RF Technologies. So not so much the the Spectrum but just how we're chunking that up. So if you think about a highway The way Wi-Fi is working is let's say it's a five Lane Highway each way.

So you're going in this direction. There's there's five Lanes at your disposal with Wi-Fi we need Three four of those Lanes to be clear because we're bringing our big thing through right? We need it.

We need all of those channels or sub channels or sub carriers to be free for us to make use of that. cellular uses much smaller sub channels and so think of motorcycles in those lanes and how many motorcycles you can fit across a five-lane highway if you needed to and that's the difference and that's part that's part of what drives this so distance. Obviously the cellular technology far outperforms Wi-Fi or anything else in that family.

resiliency on RF cellular here is very high. So one of the things about and I'm using resiliency kind of loosely here one of the things about Wi-Fi is that there's just there's a lot of knobs and buttons to tell Wi-Fi. Right what channels we use the power settings?

We've got the endpoint to deal with. There's these weird ratios we have to match because of the AP signal is too high. The laptop or the tablet can hear it, but then the laptop or tablet can't yell back that high that far.

So from a resilient C and kind of I'm gonna lump together resiliency and quality of service and some other stuff here. the availability of cellular Is higher than the availability of Wi-Fi for those few reasons? And let me come down to some of the qos stuff and explain that too.

So. Wi-Fi we describe as a contention based protocol. Each each thing in the Wi-Fi world is always trying to listen or communicate and it kind of goes.

Oh, I want to talk. Oh, I've got something to transmit and it's got back off timers. So I don't know if you're getting ready to talk and you don't know if he's getting ready to talk and you don't know if I'm getting ready to talk.

I mean right now I've got a microphone so obviously I'm talking but in general Wi-Fi is kind of like a four-way stop, right? So you've got an intersection. There's like all stop all way.

And everybody gets there. So if you all get there at the same time. Who gets to go first, right?

And so what happens So you you're in your car? and you're like, I think that guy was there first, but but he's not going so I'm gonna go but then you start to go and then the other person over here starts to go and so then a couple people stop and finally one person will go through the intersection. That's the way Wi-Fi works.

Compared to cellular cellular is what we call scheduled. So contention Wi-Fi scheduled cellular what that means is. That cellular infrastructure with the packet core and the ran with those radios.

is deciding and assigning time slots You're going to talk for this long. Then you're gonna stop you're gonna go for this long and then you're gonna stop you're gonna go for this long. And so what that means is we can have a high quality of quality of service and SLA because that is scheduled I'm not guessing that you're gonna get to transmit.

You're not guessing that you're gonna get to go to certain time. You know that because we're going to stop everything else and direct that traffic. It's like a stoplight.

So huge difference. It's not something you would notice necessarily just running around browsing the internet, but will we get into applications that are very sensitive to latency things like voice Communications? That's a huge thing.

What's not I don't think covered in here a little bit of roaming. So in the cellular World, they consider this a handoff and Wi-Fi. We call it roaming and that's when we go from one AP or radio to the other.

Believe it or not and Wi-Fi. This is one of the messiest things on the face of the Earth because if we have something that's authenticated and I'm going to spare you the Gory details here. There's a giant section in my book just on this topic.

If we are moving from AP to AP. And we have on Wi-Fi authenticated to the first AP. There are key exchanges.

There's keys that I have on my endpoint. 1x, there's keys that the radius server has. When I move to another AP.

All of that breaks except for certain situations and the certain situations depend on my endpoint. Supporting a specific roaming protocol for different key exchanges and key caches and the infrastructure to support the same thing that rarely happens what happens is and a lot of times they're mutually exclusive on a Wi-Fi network. If you've got this one enabled this one doesn't work or doesn't work.

Well. Or kind of works, but the manufacturer won't support it if it doesn't work. 11r which is a fast transition roaming protocol.

So it gets to be this huge mess because not everything supports everything and even if they do they don't implement it. Purse per the specification exactly Apple does its own thing Cisco does their own thing? HP and Aruba tend to stick to standards why it just depends.

It's a giant coin toss. and so what happens is In the Wi-Fi world, even if you look at nist guidance for things like biomedical devices. 1x because of this key exchanges.

So for context here again, we wouldn't necessarily notice it although if maybe if you want to zoom meeting and it's quirky, you might you might you might experience that but on the back end if we can't Roam and Wi-Fi under those perfect circumstances that difference is something like 10 to 20 times. The speed we're slowness. So 10 to 20 times slower for me to go from this IP to that IP, and that doesn't Certainly just happened when I'm moving I could be sitting here.

It's the endpoints that get to decide which radio they attach to and it's black magic. You don't you'd like you don't have access to the algorithm. You have no control over it this stupid thing might sit here and go this way if you looks good, but I know that one looks good.

It'll bounce between them and I'm not touching it and I'm not moving so you don't know so that's a huge problem in Wi-Fi. So when we get to Cellular, I think it's kind of obvious. the handoffs for cellular Are designed for things that are moving quickly?

And changing from Radio to radio. So the specs support that the endpoint support it and it just works. So smooth roaming low latency.

Huge huge Improvement for those type of applications that are sensitive to that. All right, so we talked about resilience. We've talked about Authentication.

1x. We would have to do something like push a device certificate. Whereas in cellular.

What we have is we have And IMEI. thermal handwriting again And an IMS side, I am EI in equipment ID or serial number something like a you know, a phone serial number that's immutable hard-coded and then we have the subscriber ID, which is what's actually attached to the Sim whether it's a physical Sim or that e-sem. And so it's this subscriber identity.

That's taking place in that authentication, but we can also tie that back to the equipment ID or the serial number and make sure that SIM card if it's physical hasn't moved so similar to you know, pinning certs and things like that. That's just sort of supported out of the box We've talked about density Spectrum RF interference because we are working in a spectrum that's largely unused and again cellular doesn't you doesn't need the same kind of Channel width that we have in Wi-Fi. We've talked about the access Hardware.

And then the traffic or data path, so going back to that. Slide where we had the different deployment and architecture models. Is that packet core in your environment?

Is it somewhere else is it managed you own it? And so that obviously dictates this traffic path, but it can look just like your Wi-Fi infrastructure looks whatever that means controller on Prem. Management in the cloud Etc Okay.

So in the last couple minutes here, let's talk about some of the security program considerations. What I like about this is that if we get one of the solutions that is that sort of at least partially or fully integrated model. We can treat the cellular the private cellular network just like we would any other part of our Enterprise Network.

It's just it's just another access medium for it. So we get full visibility into all of those endpoints. We get full visibility and control over things like segmentation once it's on The Wire.

We're supporting some of our zero trust principles because we've talked about strong device identification and we can layer user identification and authentication. We already know we have strong and mutual device authentication there and then we can keep layering those principles on to it. So from a visibility standpoint again, if we're fully integrated into the land all of our security and network operation monitoring tools.

We'll just see all of these endpoints in that Network just like you would anything else. From an asset management standpoint perspective. I think this is another kind of key thing.

So I've done a lot of work for about 15 or 16 years. And actually it's how I met Alan schemel who in Tech strong in the network access control space. So in about 16 years, I've worked with more than a dozen products with from different vendors organizations of all sizes some, you know, some of the deployments are many hundreds of thousands of of endpoints.

Some of them are tens of thousands of APs. So large deployments down to down to very small ones and the biggest challenge we have Is knowing what things are on the network. Right, it's fine.

If you've got Windows laptops, those are easy because you've probably got agents or something on them. You know, what those are people are logged into them but over the time and and this is this is a problem 15 years ago, but now with iot stuff, it's just exponentially more. There is all this.

Crap on the network and we don't know what it is. At best we see a MAC address. Right.

Now that Mac address is probably being randomized or at least on the phone now. When they came out with Mac randomization everybody in the networking and security communities that dealt with networking we said hey. Work for us.

The IEEE basically came back and said too bad suck it up buttercup. You shouldn't be using a MAC address for identification. and we said but but we do and literally all of our tools do that's how we correlate data that that's the only thing we know unless we have issued something like a certificate on a device or it has a TPM that we know about right?

And they just came back again and said too bad figure something else out. So we're kind of in this weird and this weird limbo in the world of traditional networking where the one thing we have used for security and network operations. We're being told we can't use anymore.

So we have to figure that out. In the meantime over here on the cellular side. Everything is provisioned.

So when you have a cellular network the physical Sim is provisioned or that digital esim that embedded Sim is provisioned. And therefore, you know, what's on the network because you put it there. Right, and there's a central way to do that.

If you look at Wi-Fi, we have open networks, which is fine. We have passphrase-based Networks. 1x networks where at least we have some identity tied to that but all of that other stuff, that's Mac based or passphrase based.

even if even if the MAC address isn't changing. Let's pretend it's static. We still don't know what that thing is necessarily and going and finding it especially if it's connected wirelessly and it's something small.

Well shoot if something big there's been giant printers. I've been able to not find for a while. You don't know what it is because half of the time we have we have 15 or 16 mechanisms for device profiling.

And I will tell you something that's worked in this space deeply for 15 years. We can't keep up with that. So on your network, it's it's depending on the configuration of that printer or that camera or that.

Polycom system or whatever or the little digital, you know meeting boards outside of rooms all of those things. They change there's a softer update. The device profile of that what we're scanning for changes, so we have to update that multiply that then times all of the different iot type-ish things on your network and it's almost impossible.

So from an asset Inventory management perspective, this is cool because yes, it's an extra step. But if you really care about that Network and it needs to be secure and you want to know what's on it. And have full control.

This is great. We get off my soapbox with that. Okay.

So takeaways. here are the best fits for 5G Lance when we're looking for more resiliency. And availability than Wi-Fi or iot can provide again Wi-Fi.

11 w lands is like 4000 pages. And that doesn't include all of the other protocols. 1 exercise which are their own many thousands pages of documents.

For latency sensitive applications. We kind of talked about that with the whole roaming. and handoff highly mobile same reason qos and slas because we are using a scheduled technology instead of a contention based.

Hope it works technology. a greater range and distance We have control over that inventory. And then the last thing is is that this really is still for now targeted for managed endpoints which could include BYOD.

So there are options for example an InTune for provisioning esims. So that's that is coming for us now. so my advice when I'm working with organizations for cios is, you know, consider.

A private cellular network when you're working through digital transformation. And when you have use cases that could take advantage of some of these things. We just kind of covered over here, right?

The other thing I think I forgot to mention is a cost perspective. So a lot of the things that we're looking at to connect with private cellular have traditionally been been wired which means a couple of things either it's internal wired on the land and we trenched and ran fiber for it which is expensive or it's something that needed an internet connection like some of those security and safety applications where obviously a dedicated internet line for that is expensive. So from a cost perspective putting Wi-Fi aside, we're able to take stuff that's been wired and now with cellular have a high level of confidence about that availability and resiliency of the network and make stuff be wirelessly connected that we would not have tried to do with iot protocols or Wi-Fi.

For cisos depending on your deployment model. You can certainly solve the data privacy concerns here and you can get you know full. Inventory and control over the assets on that Network.

And then for Architects my advice a lot of it people kind of just go. We're not we're not trying to replace Wi-Fi, but there are definitely use cases where cellular makes sense. It does not have to be any more challenging difficult or new thing to learn.

You don't need to be a cellular expert to use this technology. So, you know don't be afraid of it. There are a lot of resources out there if you're interested in learning about that technology on go being one of them, but don't be scared of the technology.

Don't be scared of that change. And with that I want to thank you guys so much. I think we're wrapping up right on time and I'll be around today.

You have questions. Yeah, sure. They're probably using public cellular.

So private cellular, you know, just like a private anything else in an Enterprise you would have to have that infrastructure stood up. So what they're probably doing and what a lot of the nbiot stuff is doing is it's connecting over public cellular because because that is everywhere. That's a great question.

So. cost and then that sort of hurdle of entry into the deployment and that depends on the model. So, you know some of the some of the manufacturers make stuff that work look and feel exactly like a Wi-Fi AP.

I would say their price similarly as well. So you're going to connect them with an Ethernet. It's gonna run over Poe.

It's gonna it's gonna feel just like putting an a Wi-Fi AP up other manufacturers deploy their stuff. more like a traditional public cellular infrastructure So they would need to they would need to do that. Right a that company would need to do that because it's not something in your it team will have the expertise to do and then it comes down to from a managed and deployment standpoint again if you're putting up.

These these nodes or these cellular APS just like Wi-Fi APS. Now you need less of them. So from that perspective.

It's it's less from an infrastructure standpoint cost or it can be where the expense is going to be coming is that just like when we first started moving from wired to Wi-Fi and all of the Wi-Fi Nicks were more expensive. I don't know if anybody remembers like all of the external WiFi Nicks where you pay, you know, a hundred or two hundred dollars to up fit your wired thing for Wi-Fi. That's where we are with cellular for private cellular again.

That's so new. And so, you know a laptop this model laptop support cbrs are being 48. To get that it's a little bit more expensive because it has an additional radio in it.

The dongles are still you know. I think the cheapest one I've seen is is in that 50 70 dollar range. Normally they're 100 to 200 dollars to make something that's not cellular B cellular.

So there is a there is a cost Gap there things, you know, most of our world you don't open up and it's just going to support private cellular out of the box, but that number is growing quickly. Yes, sir. Thank you.

They're private part machine. Cloud Benefit Service or I'm saying both and I think the AWS stuff is still kind of in the Amazon solution is sort of emerging. What's a little bit weird is that it's kind of it ends up being a little bit of spaghetti because the manufactures of this of these products which can be obviously the radios have to be Hardware.

The packet cores can be Hardware or software but those manufacturers. Are in this sort of tangled web of agreements with other people that are using their platforms as services. And so, you know Solona you can buy selona stuff.

You can put it in your organization. You can manage it just like Wi-Fi kind of controller architecture with the the interface up in the cloud or they have several Partners. I think NTT and now even Verizon business that are offering Salinas product as a managed service and and I'm using Sloan as an example because I'm familiar with with some of the stuff they've done all of the manufacturers are sort of in that boat where they have their their thing, but then they have five or six Partners providing their thing as a managed service and so you've got the whole the whole Spectrum there.

Okay. Thanks everybody. I'm gonna hand you back over and like I said, I'll be around if there's more questions.