At MFD7 we watched two very different presentations from Cisco and Celona, telling two very different stories about whether an enterprise can roll out their own CBRS solution.
We’ll talk about this chronologically, Cisco presented 1st. Cisco’s yet to be released solution touted “meraki-like” simplicity, but only for the customer. The backend packet-core and RAN were explained as being too complicated for the customer and would be handled by Cisco and a Cisco Partner.
To be clear the “Cisco Partners” are not current VARs that you know and sometimes love today. These are cellular technology providers with deep cellular expertise that Cisco will bring to the table and bring up to speed on the LAN technologies. That’s all well and good, but I’m not sure a current Cisco Partner wants to bring in another company that is expanding into LAN to their customer, but that’s beside the point.
Cisco will mask the complication behind a dashboard, and let other people handle the complicated stuff in the backend, and claim that the enterprise can’t do it.
Celona told a different story.
Celona talked about simplicity in CBRS, and building a solution that the enterprise can handle.
Celona calls the eNodeBs, access points, because that’s the terminology that the enterprise already uses. You can create VLANs, either internal (NATed) or external (bridged) using the same terms and workflows you would expect from a wireless controller. QOS is similar, although there’s a few cellular specific terms like slicing bandied about, it’s easy to digest.
They’ve got some work to do on the interface to make it easier to deploy and provision at a larger scale, but I love the approach celona took. Instead of saying it’s complicated, they built a solution to make it easier instead of complaining that it’s hard, and selling the enterprise on complication.
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