Celona Unveils AP-Only Private 5G Offering To ‘Democratize” Private 5G

‘We are starting to see AI, physical AI and edge AI applications, show up pretty much everywhere and the big missing piece in a lot of these places is having a reliable connectivity layer. Private 5G can bridge that gap,’ Celona’s vice president of product and field engineering, Puneet Shetty, tells CRN.

Private wireless provider Celona is making private 5G accessible to more businesses by removing the architectural obstacles to deployment, according to the company.

Celona AerFlex, launched Wednesday, is what the company calls an “industry-first” lightweight architecture for private 5G deployments that uses only cloud-controlled access points rather than on-site servers. AerFlex can integrate with existing network and security infrastructure for reliable connectivity for various workloads, like IoT and AI applications, Celona said.

The offering is expected to significantly expand the market for private 5G, which will in turn benefit channel partners, Celona’s vice president of product and field engineering, Puneet Shetty, told CRN.

“We really believe that this is the architecture that is required to start taking private 5G beyond large campuses, which is where it’s been deployed so far, and to start taking it into smaller branches, remote and distributed use cases, and hence, really start to increase the reach of private 5G within enterprises,” Shetty said.

[Related: Partners Are ‘Big Believers’ In Private 5G Powering AI, Edge Apps]

Campbell, Calif.-based Celona is starting to see demand for private 5G extend beyond large campus environments, but smaller environments often have very minimal infrastructure and IT resources, Shetty said.

Legacy telecom private 5G offerings often require the retrofitting of complex infrastructure for enterprise use or fragmented small cell systems that require multi-vendor integration, Celona said. The AerFlex approach, on the other hand, works by intelligently splitting network functions between Celona access points and the cloud using the private 5G operating system CelonaOS for seamless integration across radio, core and AI-powered management.

“It’s a combination of moving some of the controls to the cloud and also allowing for a local traffic breakout that simplifies the deployment but at the same time continues to meet the security and data compliance requirements of these industrial enterprises,” he said.

As such, an AerFlex private 5G rollout can be completed in hours instead of weeks, the company said.

“The overall driver for us is to help our customers reduce the time to value and time to deploy,” he said.

More enterprises are seeing the benefit of private 5G, Shetty said. AerFlex could help democratize private 5G, he added.

‘We are starting to see AI, physical AI and edge AI applications, show up pretty much everywhere and the big missing piece in a lot of these places is having a reliable connectivity layer,” he said. “Private 5G can bridge that gap.”

Celona AerFlex is in early beta-testing now and expected to be generally available in September.