Celona Neutral Host – Reliable Performance in the Real World

Now let's go into the second topic, which was the neutral host. Neutral host. We talked about it, uh, for quite a while.

Uh, we started deployments about a year ago with T-Mobile. Now we have the addition of at and t. But what is driving this, right?

One question is, okay, this indoor coverage from F cellular is always a challenge, but isn't it getting solved? And the answer is, it's getting even worse. 8 gigahertz and so forth, the penetration characteristics are worse than the 3G and 4G.

And the buildings are getting more and more energy efficient. So penetration becomes really hard for the buildings. So actually this problem is getting worse.

And why do our customers care about it? They care because this wireless connectivity, even with the, uh, public cellular is becoming mission critical for them. Many times they have folks on the shop floor, they need to, they may need to call a vendor for an issue, right?

And if their phone doesn't work, if a salesperson is calling, uh, the customer and if the call drops, it's a big deal for them. Or you see cases where the customers are walking in. It may be a hospital, it may be a, a retail, uh, store.

And the connectivity for their customer, for the customer satisfaction is a big deal. And also E 9 1 1 and emergency alerts, all of those things are also important for that and customers. So enterprises also care about, uh, public cellular coverage in their, uh, premises.

So we come to this, uh, as a complete solution. And the specific things we, we provided right over the last year, what, what really happened? We now added at and t.

So now we have two operators as a generally available GA solution. And we started quite a bit of deployment across different verticals. And I'll show you some of that like healthcare, retail and so forth.

And we are differentiating ourselves because our solution that, that you see here, the AP 20 is the only solution in the market that can do both 4G and 5G simultaneously, right? So we have the capability of both 4G and 5G in our aps. And uh, also our exchange or our commercial solution, MOXN is cloud-based.

So it's very scalable and secure solution. So the solution is like future proof with the 5G capabilities and scalable for our customers. And the last part I wanna highlight is in addition to the solution, we just streamlined the whole workflow.

Like from the time the customer shows interest to the time we bring up the service in the like das world, there's a lot of negotiations with the operators and so forth. You kind of streamline all of that. You take care of all the contractual interface with the operators.

So the end customer, from the time they express the interest to the time we provide the service, it's very much streamlined. It's just a matter of few weeks that, that we bring up the service. Alright, Question.

Uh, congratulations on the at&t T-Mobile relationships and hopefully, uh, there can be just a bit of a drill down how you're seeing progress, you know, with, uh, how you're working with them and so forth. Yeah, I mean, uh, this is a new thing for them as well. Although T-Mobile has been doing it for quite a while, at and t is maybe more risk, like more ramping up with this workflow.

Mm-hmm. Uh, but many things are quite streamlined now, right? There's a process, right?

Once the customer shows interest, we send an application to, uh, operators and, uh, they have an approval process. Most of the time they approve because if the customer is willing to pay, there's a real need for, for coverage. And after that approval, we do an, uh, process where we integrate, uh, the two networks, right?

Our mock and connects to their core. And then they may need to do a few changes on the macro network base stations in the vicinity. So there are different groups involved in all of this stuff, but we have regular meetings with them.

We look at the pipeline, we look at what's coming up, uh, in terms of service bring up. And, uh, so it's, it's kind of not perfect yet, but I think we are in a really good place. My ideal goal is to kind of streamline it such that we minimize any manual interactions, right?

Like ideally it's fully automated. I think we all share that vision, but it will take us, uh, honestly a few months, uh, maybe like that, that will be continuous improvements, but like the ideal place may take us actually a year or two. Okay.

That's helpful. Yeah. Especially the, the automation, you know, timeline and, uh, I think that's shared across the ecosystem.

I hear you. I hear you. Good to hear that feedback.

Awesome. I have a quick question. Um, so I understand you are, you're trying to extend the public cellular indoor, uh, do you find that your customers, they they try to do this very early, uh, as they're, you know, building the building like on the architect level type of thing?

Or do you find that the customer, they do this once the building is up and they find out that they have an issue and they're trying to solve it? Yeah, I mean, great question. Honestly, we, we see a mixture.

Okay, okay. Sometimes there's a new building that's already in the works and they're used to thinking about das and now they hear that, oh, there's an alternate solution. Mm-hmm.

They want to see how we compare price wise and performance wise. So there are new buildings that are usually, uh, potential opportunity for us, but honestly, those take like a year or two, right? Uh, the other set of uh, customers are maybe those buildings had das, which was installed like 10, 12 years ago.

Like there was a boost, uh, in the 2010, 12 timeframe with the das deployments. Operators in those days were subsidizing das. Now all of those das are, are up for renewal 'cause they're, they're pretty old equipment.

They cannot do 4G or maybe or even 5G uh, for sure. So in those, in that renewal process, then the customers start looking around, right? So that's the second bucket renewal of DS kind of bucket.

The third bucket is maybe these buildings were never eligible for das. They, they're smaller buildings, uh, they never had the budget, but now we have a very scalable solution. Even if it is one floor or two floors, they can go ahead and use our solution.

And, uh, maybe they tried wifi calling but the service wasn't maybe good enough for them. So that's the third bucket. So it's, it's kind of a mixture.

Okay. Alright. What Frequency, So all of this is still CBRS.

Okay, so we are using the CBRS frequency and that is making it very scalable, honestly, because then we don't have to work with every operator on the license frequencies and how exactly we integrate if they're on a different channel than the license bands. I mean, the device is still roam to this band CBRS band, but the, uh, interactions with the operators is kind of streamlined and simplified. And honestly the cost of the AP is reduced.

'cause now we don't have to support like six different frequency bands and all of that stuff, right? So You're really off, it's, you're not offering a das 'cause you're not in those frequencies. You are a wifi calling on CBRS.

Well, it is beyond calling, just to make sure I clarify that right. When we go through this certification with the operators, I mean it is essentially the same set of services, right? It is the voice, but it is voiceover LT or voiceover nr, right?

Walt Service E 9 1 1 or wireless emergency alerts or wireless priority services and, uh, services to like first responders, right? FirstNet. So from the device perspective, when you walk in with, let's say your at t phone, it shows like, it's, it's almost the same as an at t network.

All the services you get from a macro based station, we provide the same set of services. Does it say at t Uh, it does say like T-Mobile and at t Yeah. So from the icon perspective, it, it shows as like the, as a consumer, you wouldn't know the difference.

Basically, one of the hardest things is to demonstrate this because customer walks in just say, okay, it just worked. They said like, what happened? Well now you have full bar.

That's it. Right? And uh, also if you're in an active call, right?

In a voice call and connected state, you have seamless roaming between the macro network and this, because we are all connected back to the operator core network, everything is anchored back at the operator core network. So that's part of all the services that I mentioned. Right?

I know we are already behind. So, uh, I already talked about our 4G 5G care global AP 20. And just wanted to give a quick highlight of the traction we see in the market.

Uh, we see, uh, healthcare, retail, industrial customers and higher education as our initial, uh, bulk of the deployments to date. And these are some of the public, uh, announcements we had with Stanford and Del Conka. But today we wanted to give you, uh, some more real data field data.

So while then we'll go over, uh, some field data from the healthcare vertical, what drives the healthcare, uh, use cases are like the physicians connectivity, their phones, patients' phones, connectivity. And it comes nicely together with private cellular. So this is this one area where we see the neutral host and private 5G coming nicely together.

I'll continue from here. Uh, this, we have deployed, uh, in healthcare in multiple locations, but today we are going to focus on specific building. So our of planning is very crucial because that ensures, uh, reliable connectivity.

If you have a poor coverage, particularly in the healthcare scenario, it, uh, makes a heart for doctors and, and nurses to have reliable connectivity. So in this, what we are seeing here, we have like a three floor and each floor is like, uh, five aps and the third floor has three total. We have 13 aps deployed.

And the area, the floor one it covers is like, uh, approximately like 53,000 square feet, which is a larger area, but this five aps are good enough to cover the entire floor. So in this same hospital building, like they also have other alternative like wifi. Each room has one wifi and we see like that there's a pretty like larger coverage you can achieve with the, with the cell on IAPs here.

Do you know how many aps they had in that same space? Uh, wifi aps Uh, customer didn't share that information. Okay.

But what we noticed is each AP uh, room has one aps there. Yeah. I mean typically the ratio is like five x or so.

Yeah. Right? And We also like to show the deployment location in the hospital areas where those aps were mounted in the ceilings.

All these aps like you see here, like it's omnidirectional and it can operate on 40 megahertz bandwidth. It's like a high bandwidth. It can give you like more spectrum to have all kind of cool application.

What mam showed in the beginning, like patient phone, ip, tv, uh, monitoring, patient monitoring system. So it needs a lot of capacity to have like a lot more data to go in. And also like these, uh, solution is a plug and play.

It can easily connect to the existing routers and switch and existing firewall. And also if the customer have like, uh, existing policies in the NAC like eyes or ClearPass, we also integrate with those, uh, existing policies so that it'll be easier for them to manage, uh, one framework. And also if they want to have a large scalable like MDM kind of thing, we can also integrate like with those.

And in this facilities you can easily configure those devices in, in large scale. And most of this healthcare facilities, what we noticed, it could be like a common users, right? Like a neutral host solution where the patients come in or the guest users come in with their iPhones pixel, Samsung or galaxy phones.

So all those phone need to like work with the system and also like, uh, doctors or uh, nurses may have scanner to scan certain information about the patient. So we also have different device vendor worked with like Zebra and also dongles kind of system. They used to connect the laptop to the system.

Sometimes push to talk kind of application motor or wave kind of devices, uh, have been using in this particular building. And coverage is very crucial. Like, because in those environments the doctors make very critical applications like critical data transfer or critical patient case information.

So I'd like to show here what does this building had before CEL Noodle host versus after CEL noodle host. And if you see here, this is the floor one. Like they, if you have a default connectivity is like a macro signal which is coming inside the building.

So the macro towers can be anywhere outside the building, right? So this building has glasses like Mammoth pointed out. Like it's not like penetrating inside much.

It's like more like a reflecting. And what you see here is the RSRP indication is the rotation we use for cellular wall to represent the signal strength in wifi we call it as RSSI, right? But the difference here is you can go a little more, uh, longer RSRP values till it can able to decode.

But having red regions of like minus beyond 115 to 140, that leads to a coverage hole. What that mean is like, let's, let's say if the doctors or patients or if the staff want to communicate in this parts, maybe call won't go through. So either you may not receive the call or you cannot make a call.

Sometime it goes to a voice recorded mode. That's really critical for healthcare scenario, right? So we went and deployed our CEL neutral host solution.

So this blue circle represents that our CEL P 20 were placed and you can able to see the pretty good strong footprint everywhere so that all this critical communication can happen more seamlessly and more reliably in this environment. So I'm also going to show a live demo where I walked in this particular building. So with a, with a cart trying to connect one device to a MO network and other device to a CEL network.

So quote unquote comparison, you see on the left side it's connected to MO network, the signal strength is not that good. You see like minus 112, a hundred and 113, even 118 range on the right side, you see it's connected to the CEL network. At the same time you see the strong signal footprint.

Not only that you're moving from one AP to the other AP as a seamless roaming happens between inside the building so that this applications critical application can run more reliably in this network. And we also try to show here, like sometime these hospital buildings are 10 floors, 15 floors, right? Sometime doctors travel, they need connectivity even in the lift area too.

So we are trying to show how the coverage looks like inside this lift when you connect to ERNO versus like m and o network. So you see here it starts from 114 15 when I'm inside the lift, it quickly dropped to a hundred and uh, 1719 is pretty bad. Versus you see on the Celon network, it's pretty strong signal even inside the lip.

So this gives us more reliable connectivity everywhere inside the floor, across the floor, inside the lift. It's more crucial. So now like what could be the alternate, uh, solution could be, right?

So one we saw like using the existing macro network. The other could be like using wifi network. 4 and five.

It's pretty densely deployed. One of the, one of the key things they keep mentioning to us, like when they have this wifi network, right? Critical messages, if doctor wants to use it, it won't come on time.

Sometime it get delayed, sometime the message gets failed. Sometime they have like more poor performance. And in the emergency situation, if they want to make calls like E 9 1 1 currently the existing network, what they have, it doesn't support.

The other alternate thing they can look at it is like repeater das like amplifying the MO signal inside the building so that they can have good signal footprint, but unfortunately it can give you good signal footprint, but still it's a repeater. You're just amplifying the signal. It's not going to give you a very high capacity.

That was the challenge there. The other challenge there with the repeater desk, lack of control and visibility, right? If the customer paying for it and he wants to know what's happening in his network in terms of how many sessions it happened, what is the download usage or upload usage, particularly if they're making a voice call, what is the success rate of the voice call?

If there is any call failure, all this data, it's important for, for someone who is managing the network. So it is unfortunately there is lack of control and visibility in the data system and we, and feel like CEL could be a right fit for robust connectivity and it can also give more visibility, uh, to, to show like what is the usage of the network and voice call details. Much, much more minute, minute granularity.

This could be the opportunity to ask the fundamental question. Can you characterize amongst all your deployments, how many of the, uh, customers already had wifi implemented there Best? So they, So so This, so this one is for healthcare, but we have like customers who deployed like in other scenarios like for outdoor, particularly if I talk in terms of outdoor scenario.

Mm-hmm. So it's really like if I say an example like oil and gas, like it's pretty large area, you cannot put a lot of wifi aps to cover, right? Because you need to build a lot of infrastructure power and cabling and also building the poles.

It takes a lot of money for them. That's, it's a clear for them to see like some alternate solution like, like a long range coverage. But other scenarios like for indoor for warehouse, right?

So this like when we operate in wifi five gah hertz or six gah hertz, it's not penetrate that well, like you have lot of racks of wooden or like it observes, it's not like penetrating long, large distance. And also you end up with putting a lot of wifi aps and the mobility is the key key point here, right? This bots, this uh, warehouses move around and it makes a lot of challenging environment, Right?

Yeah. But, and maybe if you're asking about the like the neutral host type of use cases, well I talking about uh, virtually any environment I guess, uh, let me rephrase the question. Uh, do you see customers asking you to co-manage with an existing wifi implementation, you know, have overall visibility?

Are they kind of like parallel, you know that? Yeah. What we are seeing is, is it's really complimentary.

Okay. Right. It's benefiting both honestly.

So, uh, in this also neutral host use cases as they, they may hear wifi calling 'cause some customers have it enabled, some customers are not because, uh, they may not like the fact that the IP address to the EPDG of the operator may be changing and so forth. So, but as they offload this traffic to the neutral host or private network, it benefits the wifi network as well. Yes.

Right? Because then they can get better performance from the wifi side and some applications and devices they offload to the, uh, private or neutral host network. So it's, it's kind of a, a win-win situation when they have bought and it's more frequency and all of that good stuff.

Now in terms of management of it, what we typically see is the customer. I mean everybody has wifi right? Given and for wifi they typically have an installer and a managed service provider.

And typically that same uh, entity ends up taking ownership of the private 5G or neutral host solution for the customer. So it's one entity for the end customer that takes care of both networks. Yeah, I can understand the competitive advantage here.

Uh, I guess it's just adding the, and you know, of course It's an, and we Are, you know, uh, helping with you making sure the wifi network is administered to the needs of the customer, you know, in conjunction with the private 5G or neutral host. Yeah. And this slide specific to to healthcare is that like the wifi isn't poor performing a poorly installed wifi is poor performing, but you're proposing moving the applications like voice that lend itself to cellular, right over to cellular.

You're not, you're not suggesting that that wifi in general is poor? No, No. So wifi is good in most of the applications, right?

Like you mentioned. But when it comes to like more like critical, like if you have densely deployed and if you are making, I have a couple of slides, it shows about the comparison between certain application, how the difference you see like in terms of performance. So it is more good to offload such application to a, to a reliable connections.

So that's what we are trying to, I think this slide is specific to the neutral host and it, and I think maybe because you guys have presented here so many times, like they kind of skipped past a little bit, which is the neutral host is basically serving the carrier networks through your infrastructure, which is a whole separate use case from I want to deliver my own services through that infrastructure and take perhaps some of this stuff off of wifi that just needs better reliability and speed. So those things are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. You could use the infrastructure for one or both of those things.

Mm-hmm. I just have One other thing that uh, yes, most of the cases, probably a hundred percent of the cases it's complimentary and it's an and as you said. Mm-hmm.

But we are starting to have some interesting discussions with some customers, particularly when it comes to warehouses of the future and even data centers. I think there's a sudden need to, as you all know, build more data centers and as they're building new data centers and building new warehouses, they're looking at the devices that are actually being used. And if those devices actually support, have support for private 5G, they're like, do we really need two networks?

So we are starting to get those questions who are thinking of warehouses of the future data centers of the future where they're actually deciding on which technology is better for them, in which case it's an OR Decision. Alright, good to know. So This slide I'm going to talk about a little more performance between the alternatives.

What we had, like, which we talked about is the MNO network and the repeater, which is represented by RP and the existing wifi network in the same building what customer had and also the neutral host. So I'm going to show two different scenario. One is no load and with loaded scenario.

So no load scenario where you have like only one user in the network and try to use the full advantage and see what is the maximum you can get versus when you keep adding load into the network. And how that is fairly allocating in the scenario. So on the left side you see like the wifi and neutral host have maximum throughput versus when you have YO scenario, like this particular base station is just sitting outside the building, it is getting shared by other users in the building and also the repeater, which is amplifying the signal inside the building and both is not having high capacity versus when you come into the loaded scenario, when you keep adding the number of devices, we, we notice that in, in, in CBR as in new holes, like the allocation is more badly shared among the users is mainly like due to deterministic QS and max scheduling algorithm versus what we notice in wifi when we keep adding the users in the network because it has to content for the medium every time it wants to transmit.

And we saw like it's not that equally shared among the users, but we see still better performance compared to the MNO and repeat as the other important application is also the voice application. When it comes in healthcare scenario particularly it is very critical and in some emergency situation, doctors will call or some patients based on the case status from the, from the doctor, they have to inform back to their family. So we took this application and tried to understand between four different technologies.

So we have here static experiment and also mobility experiment, static experiment we performed inside this conference room. When I say mobility, I was walking with a cot, you see here with, with with, with the loaded devices moving around inside the, inside the building. And that's how the experiment in the static environment is set for the loaded environment.

What we notice, like for voice call in the baseline scenario when people use the existing signal, there are some spots where the coverage is pretty bad the voice couldn't able to go through. Sometime they're able to receive the call, but the quality of the voice is not good and sometime even it went to a recorded voice kind of system. But also the other way the operators can offload is through wifi calling.

If the device have enabled the wifi calling feature, the call can go over through the wifi network. So now like we interested to see like what happens when it's loaded versus unloaded, how this wifi can able to still really guarantee the wifi call because that's going to be a realistic scenario and a lot of patients, a lot of doctors and a lot of nurses working back and forth, the medium will get more occupied. So we, we created that environment and tried to see in the mobility scenario how that behaves.

So what we noticed when the user move around the device tried to see like which is the best AP to move on and we, we noticed the glitches and poor wise quality when the users started to move basically with the loaded carts and try to have some downloads, some uploads and some streaming applications, which is more, uh, reliable to the healthcare environment versus we saw in the CEL neutral host, we loaded the same device and tried to lock to the same radio through PCIs and we noticed that it can able to guarantee more, uh, good quality of voice throughout in the mobility scenario. So I will pass here and hand over to, uh, mammoth to take from here. Alright, thank you Ani.

So, uh, maybe just to conclude this section, the other interesting learning for us was like in the healthcare, we've been talking about private 5G for quite some time, right? We talked about the patient monitoring and maybe, uh, clinical communications and so forth. And honestly, uh, the ROI wasn't there, right?

But once we brought the neutral health, uh, the healthcare, uh, customers are now looking at this and say, okay, we can both solve my indoor cellular coverage issues so that my physicians, doctors, patients, visitors can have good cellular coverage and on top of it with the same infrastructure, now you can gimme a private 5G then suddenly the equation adds up. Okay? So in, in, in these, uh, example, for example, okay, physicians phones, patient phones, they're connected for voice and data at t T-Mobile, all great, but now the same infrastructure supports staff communications, some of the patient monitoring and even some IPTV devices and so forth.

So there's, there's good synergy between the two solutions and it also helps the wifi network because now some of this traffic offloaded from wifi to this network. So that's how we see all of these things coming together basically with the private plus neutral host. Alright.