November 17, 2025
Note, transcription performed by AI and may contain minor mistakes.
Tyler Hoffman: Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm seeing some participants in uh joining the call today with us. Uh, we I like to give it two minutes after the hour just for folks to configure out their kind of audio and technical uh setups before we get started. Um, one thing, a couple notes before we get started. Um, you'll see that there is both a chat and a Q&A functionality. Um, please let me know if you don't see that functionality and Eib, can you make sure that that's uh turned on for our folks today? I believe it is from my my perspective.
Um, now, before we go ahead and get started, as I mentioned, I'm going to give it another minute or so before we joined. Uh, I always like to say, see where our attendees are joining from. If you wouldn't mind commenting in the chat, uh, what city and state you're dialing in from today. Uh, I know we have a pretty national reach at this point, so it's always fun for me to see where folks are calling in from.
Charles, you're dialing in from Staten Island, New York. I I saw some emails from you over the past week, so good to hear from you again.
John from Portland, Oregon. There's a great donut shop out there. I'm trying to remember the name of it, if it's Voodoo. There's one competing donut shop out there that I really like too. Um, that's a good spot. Uh, Portland's a great town.
And I see some more attendees are joining us, so we're in a good spot here. Paul, I see you've joined us too. Good to good to see you there. Joe from uh Florida, and you know, long time no see from the Aptra Thrive event. Um, and Christine, I I recognize you as well. So, thank you so much for joining us. Again, we're going to give it just one more minute here, folks, before we go ahead and get started.
All right. So I see more people are filling in. Uh I want to be respectful of everyone's time, so I'll go ahead and get us started today. Uh my name is Tyler Hoffman. I'm the owner and CEO here at Metro Wireless. Uh we are a nationally known wireless provider and uh with the big excitement and trend towards private cellular networks. We have teamed up with Celona, who is the the pioneer in private cellular networks, uh to help deliver a webinar today on the topic. It's going to be mostly an educational kind of focus, uh trying not to get too technical, uh sharing some case studies, talking about total cost of ownership, where where private cellular is winning compared to alternatives, things of that nature. Uh, we'll have some time for Q&A at the end, of course. Uh, but I'm really excited about this event because uh we at Metro Wireless are known nationally to kind of be the white glove provider for all types of wireless solutions. Um, and so from that perspective, we've done a lot of diligence on who we want to partner with in the private cellular space. And uh frequently Celona's name came to the top of the batch from all the the conversations we've had. So we're excited to have the conversation here uh today. Uh also of note, Metro Wireless, we're quickly becoming a gold partnered uh partner with Celona. Uh I believe we're very close to finishing that off. Uh we have a few hanging chads of certifications on our team, but uh we're very close to becoming very uh deep with Celona. And so we're excited to partner with them today. Um again, today's session is really more educational. It's about a smarter alternative to traditional wireless, uh which we think of as, you know, typically public cellular or Wi-Fi. Um I'm really excited to have uh Pradium from Celona to join us today. He is our head of marketing and partner enablement uh on the Celona side. And then also uh as part of the conversation, Tom Benson, who is our VP of business development. He oversees all the sales opportunities here for us at Metro Wireless. Um he's going to be having kind of a fireside informal chat uh back and forth with Pradium towards the end of this session.
Now, uh if you've joined other Metro Wireless webinars over this past year, we have a few housekeeping items I like to go uh go through. Uh number one, your microphones are muted by default. If you run into any difficulties, please reach out to that email. That's Ibrahim. He's uh helping us on the back end to make sure everything is running smoothly. Um also, as you will see, we have enabled both the chat as well as the Q&A. Please post post all of your questions uh during the session. You do not have to wait till the end of the session to post your questions into the Q&A. Please put all your questions written in the Q&A box. Um we will leave the last 15, 20 minutes uh of today's webinar to be for the Q&A section, uh and we'll make sure we address all of the questions along the way. Uh as a final note, please note that this webinar is recorded and we posted in our website and sent out via email. We're going to be sending out the webinar recording, the transcription, our flyer, our discovery question checklist, you get the idea. Um, and so you'll have all the materials for yourself as well as if any colleagues of yours who couldn't join today or may be interested in the material, uh you're you're welcome to forward that along.
Um if we flip to the next slide, again, before I hand it off to Pradium, I just want to remind folks in case you're not familiar with Metro Wireless. Uh, we are proudly based out of Detroit since 2013. Uh, we call ourselves a nationally uh carrier agnostic managed wireless provider, kind of like a wireless MSP if you will. Uh and our our claim to fame is we say keep your carrier but get rid of the headache. Uh we don't care who the last mile is. We don't care if it's Starlink, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. We're all about delivering white club wireless solutions and we know the space better than anyone else. Um and my team has worked very hard to be able to boast that we do very well in customer satisfaction scores. Uh typically it takes less than 30 seconds to reach us on our knock team uh based here in Detroit. Uh clients really like our onboarding process and we typically keep clients for at least 5 years. So, um our our stats speak for themselves and that's that's all I want to pat ourselves on the back for today, but that's pretty important, I think. Um so without taking up any more time, uh Pradium, I'd love to turn it over to you to tell us about Celona and private cellular.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: All right. Thanks, Tyler. Uh thank you all for for being here. So, uh a little bit about uh Celona. Celona is a 6-year-old uh company based in the Bay Area. Uh we basically looked at uh uh the private 5G market. We basically thought the uh other guys in the in the business were making it overly complicated. Uh a lot of our DNA comes from the Wi-Fi space. We said, how are we going to take uh private wireless, private 5G uh and make it look like Wi-Fi. Uh and that's how Celona was born. So, we have uh really made our name in the market uh as the enterprise grade private 5G story. Uh we'll we'll can talk more about that, but uh we are here to talk more about what is private 5G and why are we here even talking about it? Um so, um everyone is talking about AI, uh smart cameras, AMRs, AGVs, wearable displays. You look everywhere in the news, it's AI, AI, AI.
But fundamentally, what happens is we're talking about the age of AI where everything, everybody just assumes connectivity for granted. Uh you need the coverage everywhere. You're looking at a refinery here, you know, spread over millions and millions of square feet. Uh you have AGVs and AMRs working in warehouses, delivering stuff, but you know what? You need those robots to be connected, and it's not, it's not such an easy thing. Um and when you start looking at humanoid robots, anything is going to require not just connectivity, but very reliable connectivity. Uh it needs to work all the time, everywhere with the QoS. Uh it's a big, big, big challenge, right? And uh you know, when people kind of come up with, when CIOs of companies come up with, you know, here is my AI strategy, they're only thinking about the applications they're going to use, they're thinking about generative AI. But they are not thinking about in a environment like this, in a, in a, in a oil refinery or deep inside a warehouse. Am I going to be able to connect uh my worker to this AI intelligence that I'm building over place? And it's almost happens to be a second thought. Um and and it should not be because, you know, you're going to you're going to build all these things and it's not going to be very usable. But why?
Um well, you look in the manufacturing floor, you know, traditionally everyone has gone for a wired connectivity. Yeah, the reliability over wired connectivity. Uh you can go, uh you can go keep building this. But in the new age, uh cabling is very expensive and having just wired connectivity is very restrictive as it lacks the flexibility. Uh people talk about agile manufacturing these days. Uh you know, earlier that was a linear assembly line, you manage uh you basically made one widget at a time. It went through an assembly line point to point and then you got it out. So a wired connectivity worked fine. But in the modern era of agile manufacturing, you don't have a linear assembly line. You have bots moving your article from one station to another station. And what that means is you are able to manufacture anything you want, um any day you want, but you need to have connectivity everywhere so that your bots are able to take your uh widget to the right station and have it uh connected.
So what about Wi-Fi? So Wi-Fi, especially in warehouses, people have tried it. Uh it requires a significant number of uh APIs or um access points. As you see here, uh typically Wi-Fi is uh, you know, about 5,000 square ft per access point. Uh in the indoor, it's actually even more restricted. And when you see metal cages and metal environments uh like in a warehouse, um the signal quality uh deteriorates pretty significantly. And also, Wi-Fi gets uh interrupted by, you know, you might have a microwave oven somewhere, you might have some RF radiation there, and all these things cause problem for Wi-Fi, um and leading to poor signal. Um uh mobility challenges. Again, uh Wi-Fi is not designed to move from point A to point P, whereas, you know, cellular is. Um and then um latency could be lower in Wi-Fi, but it is actually not deterministic, which is actually, I'll show you a graphic on that. And then you have public 5G.
So public 5G again, when you take it inside a warehouse, you may or may not have connectivity, especially thinking everything is metal around you, you're not going to have connectivity. Uh it's hard to, the data doesn't stay on site. Again, this is a big challenge for guys like uh refineries and petrochemicals where the data is so sensitive. They don't want to leave leave the premises. They don't want to go on a public network. It's hard to segment and prioritize the data on a public network, whether you might you you you might have a tower very close to your manufacturing uh uh facility, but if there is a school nearby and all the school kids are opening up their phones, well, the school, the priority of the network for the school kids and you, it's going to it's going to take away from from your network. Um and then, of course, it's metered data, unpredictable cost, and literally an enterprise has no control over quality of service, uh ability to secure the data or anything of that sort when it's on a public network.
So that's where the private 5G comes in. And I want to explain what private 5G is. Private 5G is essentially you're setting up a radio uh inside your enterprise. Uh think about a manufacturing floor where you're setting up your own uh access points. But these access points are not uh public access points. They are not an AT&T or T-Mobile. They are the private network. Think of the best way to think about it is it's just like a Wi-Fi access point, right? Where your SSID is only shared within that enterprise. Whereas in this case, you're actually having a private 5G network, which is transmitting um uh PLMN as they call it in the in the in the 5G space, which is only available to your enterprise. So, all the devices in your enterprise connect to this private 5G network, and then the back end of that private 5G network is actually tied not to the carriers, but to your enterprise network. So it basically the data goes from um from a smartphone or a tablet equipped with a SIM card, uh in your enterprise to our access points and then lands up in your enterprise network. So that is what a private 5G network is. So you're able to get superior coverage because now you're using higher uh signal strengths, have better radios, better um um devices, uh you're able to basically get superior coverage. Uh since it's SIM based technology, you have enhanced security compared to traditional Wi-Fi. Uh you get reliable low latency performance. I'll kind of spend a little little time on what what this means. And, you know, uh the cellular space has had mobility forever. You don't think about mobility when you're driving on a road. Similarly, if you even if you have like a million, two million square foot uh property, um you don't think about mobility uh in a in a in a cellular space. But Wi-Fi, it's actually a pretty big challenge for Wi-Fi to handle uh mobility. And if you look at it, uh surprisingly so, even though this is new technology, it's cellular um powered technology, it actually has a lower total cost of ownership and we'll kind of go over this uh uh in a bit as well.
So what does a private 5G entail? You have access points. Um the radios that we show here are Celona access points. Uh you need a core. Um the the most of these cellular networks require a core, and we have the ability to run the core either on premises or off premises and the reasons for both. And then you need uh some kind of an orchestration platform uh to activate SIM cards, to monitor the network, to monitor the devices on the network, um and things like that. So that's what the orchestrator does. Uh what Celona offers is a is a very turnkey solution. We you don't need any other piece of equipment. You we have everything we need. It's a comprehensive turnkey solution. Um uh with the hardware, software, support, warranty, everything. Uh we've offer a very turnkey uh security portfolio called Airlock. Um we are not security vendors, but we integrate with your existing uh firewalls, Palo Altos of the world, um and and and the NAC servers, Cisco, Aruba, Clearpass, all those things we have full integration into it. Um and then we have a good, we have a proprietary technology, uh quality of service called microslicing, which we'll, we'll, we'll kind of uh not cover here, but, you know, just be aware of it. An enterprise friendly integration. Literally, this radio plugs into your enterprise network. So you have an Ethernet port over there, it plugs into the closest switch on your enterprise network. You don't need any special cabling or anything of that sort. Uh it's just very, very easy to use. And since Celona, Celona OS, uh let me hit on that a little bit, is is the is the software fabric tying all these elements together, uh it's all done by Celona, the radio, the core, the orchestrator, all the software is done by Celona. So we have the flexibility to actually move the components from um uh the the local implementation on a server to the cloud.
Um so what what is let let's kind of before we um uh dive uh into the technology itself. Uh what does Celona deliver? So, um you the picture you see here, the graphic you see here is an actual um warehouse, and we have indoor and outdoor. Uh so when you look at uh the top picture, so I'm starting with the left, um we have uh an outdoor yard where there are 29 Wi-Fi access points. The round dots you see there are the Wi-Fi access points. And the graph that shows here is actually the signal strength associated with those Wi-Fi access points uh in this outdoor yard. Uh as you can see, even with 29 Wi-Fi access points, uh you see a lot of gray space. And and and and someone asked me, what is this white space over here? White space is actually the trailer. It's a trailer park. uh and and and since we are not, you're kind of going between the trailers, that's why you see the signal strength as as you see it here. Um and you can see, you know, there are patches of red, uh there are patches of, yeah, so it's like very spotty coverage uh no matter how you look at it. Um and in the bottom, uh you see a private 5G implementation and you have like consistent coverage throughout. And guess what? Uh the radios are actually mounted on the the side walls, the outdoor wall of the building. So there are three radios versus 29 radios over here, mounted on the side of the building. Why is side of the building versus middle of the yard different? Because if you if you basically mounting a Wi-Fi radio in the middle of a yard, you have to trench it and cable it. You need a pole there for installation. It's a, it's a very big job, right? It costs about $5,000 to $10,000 per Wi-Fi access point when you actually go implement it in a yard versus on uh on something which is mounted on the roof or on the side of the building, um you know, it's uh relatively low cost and the fewer access points, and that's why the tool cost of ownership of a private 5G network is actually lower than Wi-Fi. Uh this one shows an indoor environment on the right. Uh typically, you know, this is like 22 uh Celona 5G LANs versus 111, and even with 111, you can see so much gray space over here, which means it's uh it's poor coverage.
Uh this is expanding it further on, right? If you look at uh a refinery kind of an environment, you know, obviously they don't have 300 Wi-Fi APs in a refinery, but like really, if you want to give good coverage throughout a refinery, you're going to need like 300 Wi-Fi access points. The reason for that is you have all these metal piping, metal tubes, a lot of metal in a refinery or a or a petrochemical type of factory. Um whole place, we are able to cover with just 10 Wi-Fi uh 10 uh 5G LAN radios. Um so the data I have from an actual implementation is some of these radios can cost up to $30,000 to install. So go figure if you're going to do 300 radios, what that what that going to cost. So ultimately what lands up happening is in a refinery, even when they do Wi-Fi, they don't do 300 Wi-Fi access point, they just pick, you know, hotspots in their uh property where they would actually go install a Wi-Fi access point. Uh the flip side of that whole uh argument is, then you really don't have a connected worker because a worker has to walk to a access point area in order to get connectivity.
All right. Um so let's talk about latency, right? So, um I this this uh image is showing showing two two uh versions of latency measured measurements and uh um jitter on the network. The green is the Celona uh private 5G network, um and the red is the Wi-Fi. So Wi-Fi uh is not very consistent. The latency goes up and down, and the reason for that is on the Wi-Fi side, the devices control the experience of connecting to an access point. The the infrastructure basically says, okay, if there are 10 devices, then I need to basically uh time share between the 10 devices. And sometimes, um in in in a in a in a situation like that, um you're going to you're going to see uh you know, latency as high as 140 milliseconds in this case. Whereas on the private 5G side, uh the infrastructure decides which devices it wants to connect to. So you can actually set QoS on a per device or a per application basis. Uh and because of that, you're able to guarantee uh the latency to be within a certain range. Uh and and why is this important is because when you are trying to connect um a manufacturing setup or uh AGVs, AMRs on the floor, uh you need to have very reliable, very tightly bound latency, and we are able to guarantee that with uh a private 5G network.
Um similarly, when you're again, I'm I'm using the use case of a Wi-Fi uh of a AGV uh mechanism, but you have you have an AGV. Um you want to connect it. uh it's actually going between two access points. So you see AP1 and AP2 over here. Uh when the AGV actually crosses the zone for AP1 and gets into the zone of an AP2, the way it really has to do is it has to disconnect from an AP1 and then establish a connection to an AP2. But if the AP2 is already busy, maybe more AGVs are connected to that network already. What is going to happen is um it may it may it may be delayed in and connecting to the AGV and what happens in AGV? It just stops. So that's called a break before make. Whereas with the Celona 5G LAN or the Celona Private 5G network, the infrastructure manages how the handshake happens to move an AGV from one access point to another. So basically AP1 talks to AP2. AP2 says, okay, be prepared for a robot to come your way and then the transition happens. So it makes the connection before it breaks it, which is why it is reliable. Uh similarly, when you look at scalability, when you have a Wi-Fi based solution, um you know, as you scale a Wi-Fi, it's not equally distributed. The download upload bandwidth is not equally distributed amongst the various fleet of AGVs, whereas on the Celona side, it's more symmetric and and more efficient uh distribution of resources.
Um so because of these reasons, uh we can actually massively scale uh when you have AGVs, AMRs. And for those of you who are wondering what is AGV? It's uh autonomous guided vehicles or autonomous mobile robots. Um these are basically getting deployed in large scale uh in warehouses and things like that, and that's why we are talking about that today. Uh this one is showing 400 AGVs on a private 5G network, and and the lines over here are showing the transition from one access point to another access point. And you can see uh it's a mishmash of handovers, and we are able to handle 61,000 handovers a day with 400 robots walking moving around uh a manufacturing or a logistics floor with 98% success, something uh Wi-Fi just can't come close to.
Um so again, um the the way to look at this is you have your devices, they connect to access points. The access points is connecting to an existing uh IT OT infrastructure, um and then um it uh the Celona Edge which runs the core uh which uh which which actually interfaces to your existing AAA NAC server, your DHCP, DNS, uh firewall and everything else. So you're basically plugging in a private 5G into your existing infrastructure. We are not like saying, "Oh, you need a new firewall for doing a private 5G network." No, this is basically plugging right into your network uh and uh the orchestrator runs on the cloud allowing you to manage the network even remotely. So this is where we uh this is where we are, uh and then very recently, we announced a product called uh Celona Airflex, which even eliminates the need for an edge appliance. Uh so right now, our solution allows you to have um the access point directly talking to the infrastructure because the edge the core functionalities have been moved into the Celona access point and a little bit into the cloud. Um the beauty of this whole system is uh it now allows us to go after distributed environments where you might not have an IT team, you might not have IT storage and so on. Um and just by putting an access point connecting to uh an uh existing Ethernet switch, you're able to get a private 5G network.
So, again, just to draw a parallel, uh a traditional Telco based solution that, you know, uh alternative to Celona would be they would ask you to bring your own firewall, they'll ask you to bring uh your own BBU core, custom routing, dedicated switches. Uh you don't need any of that. You just need an access point uh connected to the cloud.
So, we are seeing widespread adoption of this technology across oil and gas, data centers, logistics, transportation, um manufacturing and warehousing. Um so, so clearly we've we've hit upon a few of these logistics and warehousing, manufacturing again, that's uh that's an iron um iron um iron and steel uh plant. Um you know, very hot metal, very non-conducive for a Wi-Fi kind of an environment. Uh transportation for a lot of the logistics uh under the wing. Uh we're seeing a lot of uh private 5G deployment. Uh data centers, again, they are very, very large spaces, full of metal, um again, um great, great uh opportunity for a private 5G network uh for uh the cart on wheel that's uh used inside uh inside a data center for troubleshooting and and maintenance uh of the data center.
Uh so we're getting a lot of traction with uh very large companies in oil and gas, uh manufacturing and so on. Uh and one of uh one of our customers at BP, he basically, you know, he he was one of the early adopters of this technology and and clearly sees a big shift uh towards a private 5G network over Wi-Fi uh in applications uh such as this.
Uh let's kind of go through a few use cases. So, there's a US steel mill. The challenge is spotty coverage, um you know, high metal environment, magnets, and so on. Uh and and basically the the company is just trying to give an industrial tablet to these workers so that they they can be safe on their jobs, they have latest insights on what what needs to be done. Uh and in this kind of a use case, uh they tried Wi-Fi, it just didn't work. uh after adoption of a private 5G, Celona Private 5G network, uh they had a 70% reduction in operational disruption uh versus a Wi-Fi network. Um fewer access points, and ROI for this one was achieved in under 5 months. Uh I have a full case study over here. Once you have the slide, you can just click on this link and you'll be able to see the full case study uh that you can reference. This is an example of a of a refinery. Uh Liondell Basell uh is one of our customers. Their sites are huge, 4,000 acres. So, uh we were able to cover uh 4,000 acres uh with just very few uh access points over here. Again, connected worker comes over and over again. So, uh the use case over here is video conferencing. So, you have uh a worker with a tablet, uh he identifies a problem. He needs to be able to get to an SME uh in a different country or a different part of the part of, you know, in a different location uh ASAP because he sees something bad, he wants to know what to do. They's able to now run a video conferencing team call, uh gather the data, and be able to troubleshoot uh uh troubleshoot production um as quickly as they can. And and as you can imagine, these plants run 24x7, uh and any disruption is uh is is is millions of dollars uh of uh loss for the company. And having a very reliable private network uh really helps them to alleviate some of these issues over here. And and actually, in an oil and gas environment, they also actually have uh something called turnaround. So basically, when they are uh replacing equipment, uh shutting down part of the refinery to do maintenance. um that's a that's again, you know, you have hundreds of employees working in a very small area and often connectivity is a big challenge over here. Uh and because Liel Vessel had invested in a private 5G network, they now able to set set up like a Digi or a Peplink kind of uh Wi-Fi gateway which back calls on a private 5G network pretty much anywhere on site at the refinery. Uh just just the ability for them to do uh Wi-Fi gateway back haul over private 5G uh has saved them, you know, tens of thousands of dollars each time that they need to do a deployment like this.
Um this is one of my favorite example. This is uh Del Conca is a tile manufacturer. They uh employ uh AGVs like this that move around the plant to bring in raw materials from outside to inside and then move finished goods from uh inside to the outside. Uh they struggled with Wi-Fi. Uh as you can see, you know, it has a yard, it has a manufacturing floor. Um maintenance of the Wi-Fi uh gate uh access points outside, you know, subject to the weather conditions and other things were terrible. Um these robots uh they just stopped working uh while they were deployed because the Wi-Fi hand over failures and the it just didn't scale for what they needed. Um they switched to a Celona Private 5G network and they were uh they now see almost like uh no problems with the connectivity, seamless handoffs, and um they were able to reduce their downtime from about 2 months a day um when they had a Wi-Fi network to zero. They're also using the private network uh to rebroadcast T-Mobile and AT&T signal. You DAS folks might be familiar with this. So basically, we are uh allowed to rebroadcast AT&T and T-Mobile signals inside the manufacturing floor. Uh and because of that, they got connectivity for all the uh visitors uh to their site. Um where they they previously, I mean, they they're too small for a DAS uh implementation, uh but having a private 5G network allows them to actually um um um create a uh a micro network inside the building. Now, I shouldn't say micro network, but uh create a uh neutral host network inside the building uh for um for the other people.
So, uh just taking that example of a manufacturing indoors, this is what uh total cost of ownership looks like. Um so you can see that 320,000 square ft manufacturing floor indoors, uh you would have required about 59 Wi-Fi access points to kind of uh build that network. Uh you can see that Celona gear, you just need about eight. You can see the cost of uh Celona gear is more expensive, right? Private 5G radios are more expensive, but you can see, you know, the cost of installation of 59 access points is significantly higher than the cost of installation of uh eight access points. Um but the difference is even more stark when you look at the outdoors for the reasons we had described. Um the um outdoor it required 52 Wi-Fi access points to cover the entire yard, um where whereas we could do it with just four. Um and the install cost of installation is significantly low because you're able to mount it on a roof or you're basically in the building, so you don't have that trenching and cabling cost. Um so as we look at uh even the competitors private networks, uh I showed you an example of the number of components required from a competitive uh competitive um uh competitive solution and the extra cabling that you need, uh that is the main that drives the main difference between a Celona and a competing private 5G solution. We have a TCO calculator on celona.io, so feel free to go there and plug in your own use cases and then uh you can um you can get to the uh learn more.
Um I'll pause here. Um I think uh um Tom wanted to have uh more of a fireside chat at this point in time. So uh over to you, Tom.
Tom Benson: Thank you, Pradium. This is knowing the audience, I want to I want to ask some what we're going to call channel specific. This is air quotes the channel. And so the things that would be important to the channel people, uh number one, is this something where they have to deep dive and know the granularity, or is this something where they can introduce Celona and Metro Wireless to an opportunity and then it can get qualified. They can be confident it'll get qualified and priced out without them having to know how to get granular.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Uh yeah, so again, you just bring bring Metro the leads, right? And and generally speaking, um there's a lot of fud around private 5G. Oh, you need to be a cellular expert to do this. The answer is no. Yes, you need to be a cellular expert to know how to install this stuff, but once you install the stuff for day-to-day management of this, is actually quite simple. It's like it's very similar to Wi-Fi. Um so so really, I think uh Celona and Metro Wireless in the business of simplifying uh the network deployment for you guys. So, please bring them on.
Tom Benson: And commenting on your famous competitors. Nokia's in this game, Ericsson/Cradle points in this game, HP Aruba is in this game. At a high level, how do what is your what is your commentary or your opinion on deployments with the Celona gear versus these these larger enterprise focused companies uh
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, so great question. Um I kind of will go back to uh one of my favorite charts. Literally, uh this is uh from one of our customers, a 1 million square feet deployment uh from a competitor. I'm not going to name who, uh but you can look at the the the shape of the small cell and figure out who. Uh they said uh you need like all these rack mounted equipment, right? You need two cores, you need four BBUs, you need one firewall, um and and a dedicated switch in order and and 96 small cells with all this custom cabling in order to run it on that facility. So now, somebody sees a bill of materials that looks like this, they're going to get scared, right? And uh the the simplicity and even when they do all this, uh this is basically uh a a network that is set up within a network. So, basically, you have no visibility on the 5G side. So, let's say you want to set up policy for a 5G device, you cannot do this with this kind of a solution because this is designed for a macro network. They took a macro network based solution and they are shoving it down an enterprise, uh which is not the right uh right way to look at things. On the other hand, with the Celona Airflex, uh Celona Airflex is extremely simplified version, but even when you say you want to have like a localized edge, um all you need is an access point and an edge, and that's it. And we we basically leverage the existing um enterprise network for doing rest of the things. We don't need special cabling. Uh and because we are enterprise friendly, we basically allow you um full visibility into the network. So, every 5G network, if you want to configure the policy on it, you can do it through your existing uh AAA NAC servers, you can use your existing firewalls and so on.
Tom Benson: I'm going to editorialize. We're recording something right now, 100,000 square foot warehouse. We got a bid from a famous competitor. We compared it side by side. They came total cost of ownership 3 years uh about exactly a million dollars. Uh call it a million bucks.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yep.
Tom Benson: Um, we priced it out on the Celona side. TCL came in at under 500, so we were 50% off and we looked at that. We looked at that side by side and we go, we got a problem here. We're so much less, we're going to have to justify this because our competitor everybody's heard of, um, and we're bringing this. So that's in progress, but it was a startling difference, guys. It was startling. Uh, it wasn't 10% less, it was 50% plus less. Um, plus ease of use.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: And and getting, so that is just the cost of the network. But when you look at the complexity of the other solution, I mean like we can be in and out, uh, we can have a network deployed within a week, right? Uh, versus uh versus some of our competitors, you know, it literally it'll take you 5 to 6 months for the simplest.
Tom Benson: So you're saying it costs less and it's installed more quickly?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Exactly.
Tom Benson: Which means the chances for mistakes in a six months install plus the disruption is enormous.
Okay, then I have a question on uh, Wi-Fi. It's a two-part question. One, why can't an enterprise just keep adding more Wi-Fi nodes?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah. Um, that's a great question, and that's, that's typically if you go to a Cisco, that's what they will tell you, right? Oh, you have poor coverage there, keep adding more Wi-Fi nodes, right? Uh, it's good for their business, and that's exactly what uh they would do. Um, the challenge with that is you get all this co-channel interference. So, just because you densify a network, uh doesn't mean that your network is going to work better. Uh, in on the other hand, managing the spectrum and managing the interference between one Wi-Fi and the other Wi-Fi actually becomes more of a science project. Uh it's not impossible to do. You can do it, but, but why? But why do you want to go through that level of densification? And guess what? The next time they come and say, "Upgrade to Wi-Fi 7," um you're going to, you're going to have to go strip all the stuff, all the high density Wi-Fi access points that you did and you have to replace them. Uh so that's, that's kind of uh, it's not the best, it's not the, you know, for the reasons we covered, uh whether it is uh mobility or whether it is uh higher coverage area or whether it's quality of service, you're not going to get that with Wi-Fi, especially in the industrial environment. I'm not talking about office environments. Office environments, Wi-Fi is great, but in the industrial environments we're talking about, it's not so great.
Tom Benson: Understood. Um, in the interest of time because I want to get into the Q&A, I I I'm put my opinion on this and then go to the Q&A. Um, the channel, I've been in the channel since 2012. What what I feel like what I see the channel do is it takes, it takes Fortune 500 technology and it brings it into the mid-market. Um, this is you do not have to aim at BP to get a deal here. If anybody who's building anything. So, your target market here is not an insurance company and it's not a suburban office building. This is the uncarpeted enterprise. This is going to talk to people who make things or move things. Yeah, make things or move things. That's that's your target market here. So, we're going inside the building and we're solving the problem inside, but if they have a 50,000 square foot building and they they're moving things, this technology is applicable. You don't have to take down Shell Oil to uh to get a private 5G. This is everywhere.
And I want to link this back to, it isn't just an inside land. This is what's enabling their AI initiative. This is what's enabling their IoT initiative, and this is what helps them and this is what enables their AGVs is the term that Pradium used. Their remote vehicles that are running inside. But the robotics age is coming. America cannot fill its manufacturing job openings. And therefore, the robots are coming for a number of reasons. So, what you're linking to here is a multi at least a decade, if not a multi-decade roll out of AI, IoT, and autonomous vehicles. So, investing in learning in this will give you a decade's worth of opportunities and frankly, allow you to stand apart from just another WAN circuit provider or someone else trying to sell a cloud license. So, those of you with appetite for the new who want to get ahead of the curve, this is SD-WAN in 2009. This will take over, and uh it's worth the time to invest in it if you have appetite.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, absolutely.
Tyler Hoffman: Uh Tom, I love that that comparison to to SD-WAN because I I totally take your point well there and I knew what you meant. Um, awesome. So Pradium and Tom, we we have a number of questions rolling in from uh the chat and the Q&A here. Uh I'll I'll play moderator here for the questions. Uh Austin Kellen. Uh by the way, Austin, good to hear from you. Uh Pradium, Austin is a very valued partner of ours. Um, he does a lot in the in the temporary event space uh by the way, which I'll ask you a a second part question here in a moment. But uh Austin's question is, and he's going back to your case study example about, uh, what's the maximum amount of robots if they have more than 400? Um, the way I'm interpreting your question, Austin is, you know, uh Pradium, how how does Celona handle the fact of how many concurrent connections you can have per AP? How do you handle congestion, things of that nature? Uh that's how I interpret Austin's question here.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Right. Um, so, so the short answer is, um, you know, yeah, it's so it's a very good question. Uh, the number of, maybe a broader question is how many devices can connect to an AP, right? So, so really, um, the the number is to in an AP is 128, but really, when you look at uh a factory or something, you're going to have multiple APs, and all of them are not going to be in the same zone at all time. So you would basically um have a scattering of them. And then there is also this active connection versus, you know, it's not actually using the network for anything. It is in the zone, but it's not using the network for anything. Um so you have uh very various dependencies, but, you know, uh roughly, you know, 128 devices per access point is the number uh if you're looking at a density play.
Tyler Hoffman: And just to follow up to that question, because again, uh we do a lot of temporary event work with Austin and in general, if if we're in a situation uh Pradium where we want to, we we think we're going to have more than 128 uh concurrent connections in that zone. Are we able just to uh add more APs in that in that that area?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: That's exactly what you would do.
Tyler Hoffman: Okay, copy. Um, the second question from Austin is, uh, so we don't need to it's it's about uh the backhaul circuit. So, if we don't need to bring in a separate or we don't need to bring in a separate fiber pipe just for the 5G, we can use whatever current uh circuits are in place for internet access at the the client site.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yes, that's exactly right. So, it's a double-edged sword. So, you you you basically, if you don't if you have a poor uh uh internet pipe, then it's going to be a problem. But, again, let me kind of uh clarify that a little bit because the only data that's going from the private 5G network um into the cloud is actually the orchestration data. So, so really, if you think about it, uh if you are moving data from your enterprise into somebody's tablet on the factory floor or something like that, um that data is kind of stays local, right? So, so really, I think you're looking at uh, you know, you need a very low bandwidth um uh if you're using a non-Airflex product, I I I know I showed you Airflex where you have the core local, um then in that case, you don't, you don't, you don't need a very high bandwidth um um back call.
Tyler Hoffman: Yep, and that makes and that makes sense there too. Uh Austin, I will say I've seen some really cool deployments with Celona and Peplink for temporary events. Um so let's definitely talk about that uh because Wi-Fi as we know gets so congested in the in the event space. Um the next question we have Pradium is uh from Frederick. Uh his question is about what is the EIRP per AP, which is uh some people know is kind of the uh the power level if you will of an access point uh of a piece of hardware.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um I'm going to completely wing it. I don't I don't I don't know the answer to that. I'll I'll send you the data sheet. Uh we can post the data sheet and it has all that information in there. Sorry, I don't know right off the top of my head.
Tyler Hoffman: Sounds good. And I'm going to go ahead and infer a a follow-up question to to Frederick's question. Why is Celona or private cellular able to deploy with such uh fewer AP count than say Wi-Fi? Maybe that's kind of the gist of the question.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, so it's uh it's two things, right? So, um you're able to transmit uh at a higher power compared to Wi-Fi. Um and the devices that are operating on a Wi-Fi network, I think they um go up to -70 or -80 dBm is kind of the the threshold for it, whereas for a private cellular network, it's somewhere in the negative 105 dBm. So, you're basically your your your devices that are operating on the network can actually operate on a with very little signal as well. So, that's the reason why you have uh um yeah, that's the reason you have higher coverage.
Tyler Hoffman: Yep, and a fewer uh a lower deployment footprint versus say traditional Wi-Fi. That makes sense. Um, Austin's looking for some ballpark here. Uh, so what would a million square foot warehouse cost? Um, you know, I think he's trying to get a sense of both MRC, like an ongoing recurring management cost. I know Pradium, you wouldn't know what our system integrator management fee would be. Uh, but as far as from a uh an upfront cost, maybe that would be helpful as well as I know Celona has some licensing attached to its network. How how does that work for say about a million square feet of warehouse?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Sure. Um, so for a million square feet, Imean, again, uh you need to do an audit design in order for you to be able to establish the number of access points and things like that. But, um, and and you can also use the TCO calculator that I uh shared uh earlier on. Uh, but in in in general, a rule of thumb is 50,000 square ft per access point is what we need. And the way Celona sells its access point is a subscription. So, you you you basically um spend like whatever, uh 7,000, $8,000, that's the list price of a Celona access point. It includes all the software updates, uh warranty, everything you need for a period of 3 years, uh or a 5-year term. And at the end of 5 years, you choose to either renew your term or replace the equipment with 6G or whatever else, right? So, uh that's that's kind of how our our solution works. So, we don't charge anything beyond the cost of the AP. So, uh, you know, a million square feet, if you need uh 20 APs, uh you pay 20 times uh $10,000 list price. So, obviously be a discount on that.
Tyler Hoffman: Got it. So the the license for the Celona APs is uh on a upfront basis and you pay for say a three or a five-year term and that's you pay that once for that duration.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Copy. Yep.
Tyler Hoffman: Um, Austin, I think Tom and I can work with you offline in getting some more uh refined numbers for both MRC and NRC. And then Austin, one thing to keep in mind and and to the entire, you know, audience here, uh we do have equipment financing options, right? So if you have clients that have a appetite for OPEX only and not for CAPEX upfront, uh we routinely feel those opportunities and so we're happy to put together OPEX only options with you. um there. Uh one other comment too, and and Pradium, we were talking about this as we prepared for this webinar. It's not just about the cost of the Celona network. I think there's a big conversation to be had about the endpoints and things of that nature. I don't know if there's anything um you want to say, you know, to that effect.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah. Um if you had if you had asked me this question 3 years ago, I would have said, "Hey, you know, uh be look out for uh the endpoints because there weren't as many private 5G enabled endpoints." But um just to give you a point of reference, iPhone 11 onwards have actually supported private 5G networks. So, basically, you're in the fifth or sixth generation of Apple devices uh that that that have supported private 5G. Same thing for Zebra, uh same thing for even guys like industrial tablets like Honeywell, um so we are seeing widespread adoption of private 5G. But your Wi-Fi device is not going to work here. Uh it's going to be mostly uh cellular enabled device that you need in order to connect to a private 5G network, or you go get a Peplink or a Digi router uh to kind of translate uh the the private 5G signal into a Wi-Fi on a more localized basis.
Tyler Hoffman: Yeah, and into that point, Pradium, I just have to plug uh the fact that we, you know, we're exclusively with Peplink, right? And so we're very happy with their routers and they've been doing so well in the private 5G space, uh both very feature-rich, but also very cost-competitive. So, um that's that's something where we've seen good success on the Peplink side. Uh moving on to the next question, Pradium, you were just talking about site audits and surveys. Uh Frederick has a question about how do you determine the AP count and placement at a facility? Uh similarly, what's the RF design platform that Celona uses and recommends? Um any comments there?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah. Um so, again, RF design is um uh it's uh as much art as it is science, right? So, it's uh um it's it's a pretty complex uh thing. Uh but there are great tools available. Uh we use uh technology uh from a company called Eno, EIO. Um they have a fantastic product. Uh we also work with guys like IBwave uh for uh indoor design. Um but uh but basically, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of products available there. Uh but uh you can use our TCO calculator as pretty much like a ROM uh estimate to get the number of APs and things like that, but clearly, uh it depends on the construction, RF design, every all the problems you had with DAS still applies to a private 5G network. Uh so, I just use it with caution.
Tom Benson: I think we have an E subscription. And so, this is not, again, you don't have to get granular. We will design this. If you bring the opportunity, if you hear they're outgrowing their Wi-Fi, if you hear of problems inside, then we plug it, then we get the floor plan, we plug it into Eno, we do some magic, and we get within 20% on cost just based on that preliminary survey, uh and then we can go forward. So, you do not have to deep dive, you have to find the opportunity, and then we have the resources behind it to to get a quote out and get a number out and get it installed quickly.
Tyler Hoffman: Yes, exactly. Well said, Tom. So, yeah, we we handle that on behalf of our users with uh EINO, Eno, or IBwave, similar to how we do our DAS practice. So, that's that's right there. Um a quick follow-up to that question, too, Pradium is, uh the current lead time on your equipment. How are you guys doing on the supply chain?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um it depends, right? Uh because we have, we have a large number of SKUs, uh 4G, 5G. Uh in the US, it's uh band 48, uh but globally we have other bands that we need to support. So, it's really um uh a question of uh um how many units are needed and when, and uh we basically optimize it from there. Uh but in general, most of our most of our high runners are available in stock and we'll be able to ship it uh ASAP. But uh but I can't say that uh universally, right? Because it depends on what you're ordering.
Tyler Hoffman: Copy. Okay. Um, Janet Marie has a question about how would this work with Meraki? Um, I'm sure she's referring to um their their networking equipment.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, that's an interesting question. Uh we don't uh specifically go work with Meraki um because that's a Wi-Fi solution. But, again, we don't we we like to look at Wi-Fi as a friend of me, right? Like, yeah, I mean, we're not going after the office space for Wi-Fi. Like, Wi-Fi is great in office space. Don't please don't ask and even recommend anybody to pull out their Wi-Fi in their office and replace it with private 5G. It's not a good decision. Uh but if you have this hybrid environment where you have Wi-Fi in the indoors and maybe an industrial outdoors, um I think uh uh more and more tools are getting ready, but uh we don't directly integrate with the Meraki if that's what you're asking. But we do integrate with the existing NAC and AAA NACs and firewalls and things like that. So from an enterprise standpoint, uh it it it can look more like an integrated solution.
Tom Benson: Pradium, is this an accurate statement? A company can keep their Wi-Fi network operating and layer on top of that a private 5G PCN network for future growth. They they are compatible side-by-side because there's no frequency contention between the two?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Absolutely. No, that's a great point. Yeah, they it operates on a completely different band. So, uh you can do that and many people in fact do that. Uh they don't kill Wi-Fi, but if they know that they're going to deploy AGVs, if they know they had they need connected worker connectivity across their outdoors, that's that's when they they look at private 5G.
Tom Benson: So their existing Wi-Fi investment is not going to be ripped and replaced. It can be it can go out to end of life logically.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah. Look, use the right network for the right use case, right? That's that's kind of uh the philosophy. If you are in an office space, Wi-Fi works great, then you don't have a problem. Don't even think about private 5G. Where Wi-Fi is a problem is when you have to think about private 5G. It's not a rip and replace at all.
Tom Benson: Understood.
Tyler Hoffman: Good deal. Um, Frederick had a question about becoming a partner. Uh I'll answer that one. Frederick, we're happy to reach out to you. Uh my team's already made a note to follow up with you and Tom after this call. So we'll we'll handle get you taken care of as well as with the data sheets that uh Pradium mentioned earlier about the EIRP.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um, so one of the big differences between the big uh Telco and us is all our stuff is on the web. Like literally, we we throw everything out there, right? Like data sheets, uh installation guides, uh all the how-to videos, everything is on the web. So, just go to celona.io, learn more, you'll find a ton of resources there. Uh very few reasons why you would actually need to call uh anybody at Celona because we just throw everything on the web and it's available uh quite easily for people to use.
Tyler Hoffman: Excellent. Good deal. Um, another kind of uh question about the hardware. Does Celona require a GPS signal? Uh is it like a GPS, I'm thinking about my time in fixed wireless. Do you need a GPS puck on the equipment? Does it typically require a roof penetration, that type of thing?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: You do. You do need a GPS uh signal. Uh so that there is an internal PTP timer in on the access points, but you do need like one one GPS source that you're able to uh hook up to and uh, you know, for the timing for the network. Yeah. So whether it's outdoor or indoor, you do need a GPS.
Tyler Hoffman: Copy. Okay. Um, Kevin Karsch has a question, is do you integrate with Fortinet, FortiNAC, NAC? Uh I'm obviously familiar with Fortinet, but I'm not sure about this particular type of equipment.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um, so, uh we haven't, I I have to check whether we have explicitly uh integrated with that. So, basic thing is, all our stuff is API, right? API friendly stuff. And uh we've we've specifically integrated with Cisco NAC and uh Aruba ClearPass uh from a NAC standpoint. We've not done Fortinet. I don't think we have done Fortinet, but uh the APIs are available for anybody who wants to, who wants to integrate, do that integration themselves, right? So it's not, it's not rocket science. We have the the the hookups to do it. Uh and same thing with firewalls, too. Yeah, we we've we've established it with Palo Alto. We have uh extreme level of integration with Palo Alto to do uh threat detection and and and quarantining and things like that. But that doesn't mean that we cannot work with Fortinet or anything. The APIs are available. We just haven't done it yet.
Tyler Hoffman: Copy. Uh Brian has a question about why is the latency minimum of 20 milliseconds? Uh he has a thought that 5G was promising close to zero uh on the latency. Um any comment there?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: I think there are multiple flavors of 5G, right? Like I think we are uh in release 15 of uh the 3GPP standards. Um there are release 16 and above, they have a feature called URLLC that kind of further reduces the the latency. So it really depends on which flavor of uh a private 5G you're using. It's not going to be close to zero, but but yeah, I mean it it can be lower than 20 milliseconds for sure. Um and the way we handle it is uh our third generation uh uh access points which are actually stated to come early next year, uh they have the latest release, release 16, release 17 would be supported in that. Uh so you'd be able to see a significant uh improvement in latency numbers as well.
Tyler Hoffman: Excellent. And Kevin had a follow-up question about can, can they, can he use his own access points?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Uh no. So Celona solution is more turnkey. So basically our software runs on the access point and on the edge and everything else. So, no, you cannot use your own access point. It has to be Celona, Celona access points.
Tyler Hoffman: Wonderful. Uh we have a question from an anonymous attendee. Uh how do they engage in opportunities? What data points in general do they need to quote the service? Is it similar to the server survey requirements for DAS? Um I can comment from the system integrator perspective. Uh I'm assuming this attendee has used been familiar with our DAS quoting process. Uh yes, please send all inquiries to sales@metrowireless.com. My sales team including Tom Benson, uh will pick up the inquiry and we'll send over a list of initial discovery questions. Uh you'll receive that in a PDF format, nicely polished uh after this webinar call here today. And that's how we'll engage in opportunity, uh taking a look at your site plan indoor, outdoor, number of square feet, things of that nature, endpoints. Um that's how we begin that process in in the quoting uh uh initiative with you.
Tom Benson: If you want to distill that down, what number one, how big? How many square feet? So, floor plans. How many square feet? Uh you have to have it. And number two, how many endpoints are we supporting today? And how many endpoints are we moving towards in the next 2 years? And if you have those three things, uh you have the basis of a P5G quote.
Tyler Hoffman: Yep. Well said, Tom. Uh Charles Bridgman has a question about, what if my customer needs voice for phone calls and not just data for robotics? Can Celona still be a solution for the customer?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um, I think there are a lot of uh um over the top applications, right? I forget the name. I actually met with one of those guys. They actually have like a uh walkie- talkie um uh radio service running on uh on a 5G platform, right? So, you can enable uh many of those. Uh we do have neutral host. Um right now, AT&T is is kind of available everywhere. So, if you have an AT&T SIM, you can actually have a voice call being placed on uh on a private network. But uh but yeah, I mean, that's that's that's a different solution, right? So, yeah.
Tyler Hoffman: Yeah, and I think maybe Charles's question was getting at the fact of like, can you transmit all types of data on the network? And I I think the answer of course is yes, it can be whether you need AI, robotics, IoT, uh voice calls, video calls. It's it's a medium of it's a medium of transfer rather than any type of.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, yeah. And and you can not only do that, but you can also prioritize them differently on your network, whether you want to have high uh more bandwidth allocated for one versus the other, you can do that all.
Tyler Hoffman: Excellent. Um, another anonymous attendee had a question about what, you know, why should a company or a user select uh the standard Celona 5G LAN solution versus Celona Airflex, uh which I know is your newer platform.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: That's a good, that's a great question. Um, so for, um, the standard solution is actually, we're going to make both available, right? So, we're not saying that uh the edge at the local is is going away. The answer is no. Um, but uh so if you have more than five access points, it it probably be better for you to put the edge um uh edge locally. Uh and the use cases driving it are mainly like how reliable is your backhaul? Because the minute you start moving control plane to the cloud, you need, you need higher bandwidth backhaul uh connection. So, if your backhaul is kind of flaky, uh you're better off having an edge on premises. Uh if you have uh more of a mobility use case, like, you know, we we spoke about 400 robots and 25 miles an hour each one running. So, you have high high mobility use cases where it'll be switching between access points. In those kinds of environment situations, you're better off having a localized edge. Um where uh a a an Airflex deployment would be great is, "Hey, I have this remote warehouse, middle of nowhere, I have no IT, I don't have a rack space for uh server over there." Great for an Airflex. You just go put this radio up there, connect it to your internet backhaul, and you're done.
Tyler Hoffman: That That's very helpful because I've always I've been wanting to figure out a better way to quickly explain to users and partners on when to use Airflex, when to have a local core versus a cloud core. So, that's that's helpful.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: And we also have a virtual core. So, if you have servers already over there, uh we could even put it on a VM. Uh so the core, you don't need to buy a Celona appliance. You can just run it on an existing VM as well.
Tyler Hoffman: Yes. And and Pradium, uh remind me, as I understand it, you know, we talk about, I think one of your case studies talked about the bands B48, N48, uh and 78, or 71. But, um are are the new Air um uh access points as well as the um you know, all the Celona 5Gs, is it backwards compatible with the LTE, private LTE uh bands as well?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um, it depends on the radio. Um like uh our AP 20 2X family uh are all 5G. Our AP 1X families are all 4G. Um generally speaking, we are moving more in the direction of 5G APs because that's where the world is going. Uh but there are some APs, AP20, for example, can support both 4G and 5G. Uh so if you have that kind of a situation, you would actually use one of our AP20 type of uh uh things to to do both 4G and 5G.
Tyler Hoffman: Excellent. Okay, and kind of that dovetails into Larry's question well about, you know, he has a potential market opportunity for private 3G network. Um, hewants to schedule a call to see if there's any 3G options available. I I asked a follow up to Larry to understand a bit more of the use case, uh but we we might have to take that one offline.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah, we don't have a private 3G offering. So, in fact, we are moving very fast from 4G to 5G. So, I think uh the market is actually, in fact, global, only in the US you have this 4G thing. Globally, everyone moved directly to 5G.
Tyler Hoffman: Ah, I see. I see. Uh finally, we have a question from an anonymous attendee about um the best router to pair with Celona and they're hearing that Peplink is the best option. Uh we obviously have a very vast interest in Peplink, right? And so we're very happy with their routers and they've been doing so well in the private 5G space, uh both very feature-rich but also very cost-competitive. So, um that's that's something where we've seen good success on the Peplink side. Um Pradium, I know you were at the Peplink tech summit uh last week. Uh help me or or two weeks ago. Help me understand, you know, where you see Peplink kind of fitting in to Celona and the best use cases for it.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Yeah. So the biggest use case that I see for most of these gateways are um applications which are like, you cannot go and rip apart uh go into a manufacturing floor and say, "Hey, upgrade all your equipment to uh 5G uh 5G compatible network, right?" It's not going to happen. Some of them are going to be sitting on uh Modbus, RS 232, EtherCAT, like, you know, you have all these ancient standards that these machines are connected on. Uh so you need a bridge that connects this old world to the new world, and that's where these gateways come in. So, my my favorites are Peplink and and Digi, right? Like Digi is is very strong on the industrial side. Peplink is very strong on the Wi-Fi side and the enterprise side. Um and uh the very, very common use cases in that oil and gas refinery that I spoke about, they still need Wi-Fi in a in an area. In a warehouse, they still need Wi-Fi in a pocket because their printers and their scanners, they're all still using Wi-Fi network, right? Uh so you need this little, I call them a mushroom of Wi-Fi uh in in this whole environment, and you can set up that mushroom pretty much anywhere uh with a Peplink uh gateway, for example, back called over private 5G uh and and set things up. And with with all the speed fusion and everything Peplink has to offer, right? Um so that makes it a great, great uh um I guess uh uh a uh it it enhances our value uh to the customer.
Tyler Hoffman: Yeah, it's uh it's pretty cool what they're doing in the space. It's getting uh they're more capable but also more affordable to deploy than ever. So, it's it's very nice. Um, Tom, any closing comments uh from you? I know you have to run to another session here. Um, but I I any anything from your side that we're missing?
Tom Benson: Yeah, I'm I'm I'm going to reiterate. This is, this is at least a decade roll out. And so, if if you want to keep, if you're looking for the next thing, uh this is it. This is a multi-billion dollar roll out over time. You have time to learn and your customers are looking for this solution. Wi-Fi has reached its saturation point. And uh if you want to even get political, if America's going to continue to compete in the manufacturing world, this is the technology that's along with cloud, AI, IoT, remote vehicles, um this is the technology that's going to fill the gap to drive those services down on the manufacturing floor. So, uh whether you're in it for the money or love of country, this has a multi-decade roll out.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: It it it does and I would like to add one more point. Uh our biggest challenge today is awareness. Um people like, I mean, I I I was at the Peplink Summit, you know, in a room full of IT people, and I can guarantee you like maybe 30, 40% of them didn't know what private 5G was. So, this is a big problem and we really need to propagate this message so people know that there is an alternative. We just need to just need to think about it.
Tyler Hoffman: Yeah, and that's, you know, Pradium, again, Metro Wireless, we are going to go just as we did in DAS 2 years ago and it's it's paid off really well for our partners and ourselves uh and the users. Uh we're going really, really deep in private cellular with you guys as our as our core partner here. So, um with that in mind, Pradium, are there any closing comments or things that we should be aware about that we have not asked you yet today or that you have not covered?
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Um yeah, so, um I think we are well covered. Uh I think there is an awareness problem. So, uh and and how do you, what are the awareness? So, there is one is awareness problem, like an IT guy not knowing about private 5G. The other one is, "Do I want to stick my neck out here and go deploy uh a private 5G network versus just take a mist and do a Wi-Fi 7 version of mist, right?" So, so every guy, every decision maker is kind of at this point, uh, "Do I want to stick my neck and risk my job versus uh just stick with Wi-Fi?" And and and candidly, I think the the reasons we explained today are the reasons that you guys need to communicate to your customer, saying that if you don't do this transition, the your competitors are going to eat you up because they are deploying these kinds of technology, they're going to robotics, they're doing AI, they're enabling their workers with all these smart tools, you're going to be left out in the race. And that's the message you need to communicate. And and candidly, I think we have done this enough number of times that we can reduce the risk uh pretty pretty and we can kind of show them a deployed network within weeks. And and that's uh that's a confidence uh that I have. Uh Metro Wireless is a great partner that way. So, I think that's the message we need to communicate out there.
Tyler Hoffman: Yeah, I I think that's right. And that'd probably be my closing comment too, is, you know, if you think about Metro Wireless as your system integrator partner, we're we're here, we're the ones figuring out the IBwave software, how many APs to deploy, the cabling, the installation requirements, the endpoints, right, whether it's Peplink, using your existing forklifts, Zebra scanners, etc. Uh doing the installation itself, indoor, outdoor, needs, towers, uh circuits, right, for backhaul that Austin was talking about. And then finally, the the final um, you know, management, ongoing management and support of, you know, lighting up the activations on the SIMs and the eSIMs. That's that's where we come in and where we play well. So, um I'm really excited. Pradium, if uh looking at the attendance today as well as the Q&A, I think we we we definitely got a lot of engagement um from our audience. So, I want to say one, thank you so much for everyone who's joined today. I know we've gone about 11 minutes over, but I think that's a sign of a good good discussion that we've had here. Uh Pradium, thank you so much for the support on the Celona end and your time too. Uh this is of huge interest to our partners. I'm I'm seeing the opportunities from the pipeline, and Metro Wireless continues to get more and more inquiries each week, each quarter, each month on this. So, we're we're excited.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Uh excited for the partnership, and thank you for the opportunity to get in front of your uh account base.
Tyler Hoffman: Absolutely. Well, everyone, as I as I said at the beginning, uh this session is recorded. We're going to be sending out the webinar recording, the transcription, our flyer, our discovery question checklist, all the content that you need, uh as well as my sales team will be reaching out privately to each and every one of you uh to set up time to continue the conversation. So, thank you so much. Have a great day, and we'll be in touch. Talk soon.
Pradhyum Ramkumar: Thank you.
