Celona recently announced the expansion of its neutral host solution with the addition of AT&T. Celona Neutral Host enables organisations to improve the customer experience for cellular subscribers by extending public cellular coverage into environments with poor cellular reception.
Certified previously with T-Mobile, the solution is now extended to millions of AT&T subscribers when they enter a building covered by a Celona 5G LAN network, delivering on the stringent KPI requirements of each operator. The solution is powered by Celona’s Cloud-based Multi Operator Exchange (MOXN) that creates a secure tunnel to the operator public network.
With Celona Neutral Host, any device, including smartphones and tablets with SIMs and eSIMs from AT&T and T-Mobile, can automatically detect, authenticate and connect to the Celona 5G LAN over CBRS spectrum. The data and voice sessions are seamlessly routed to the respective mobile operator networks. Completely transparent to users, Celona Neutral Host appears exactly like each carrier’s regular public cellular services – allowing subscribers to automatically connect and authenticate to the service on their cellular devices with excellent quality. No special setup is required from either the user or the operator.
Celona has officially achieved the certification of its 5G LAN solution with AT&T after completing a suite of interoperability and regulatory test cases in the AT&T lab. The solution then successfully completed a large-scale live production trial with Stanford Health Care. The certification of Celona Neutral Host ensures the highest levels of service integrity for AT&T subscribers, such as support for high quality voice and data services, emergency services including e911 calling, and other vital subscriber services with full regulatory compliance.
Available immediately within the United States with support for AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers, Celona Neutral Host is capable of concurrently advertising up to five different mobile network operators (MNO) as well as providing a discrete private wireless network signal for specific enterprise use cases.
By leveraging and sharing the existing enterprise LAN and WAN infrastructure, private 5G-based neutral host networking is a modern approach developed to provide high quality cellular coverage while roaming from the public network onto the private network.
Celona Neutral Host is simply enabled on the Celona 5G LAN, increasing public cellular network coverage and capacity while dramatically reducing capital and operating expenses. This creates a unique benefit of the Celona solution – it works for businesses of all sizes – from the smallest retail store up to the largest hospital. Included in the Celona solution is the flagship Celona AP 20 indoor multimode access point that supports both 4G and 5G, so that enterprise can meet both today’s and tomorrow’s coverage requirements.
At the core of the solution is Celona’s MOXN technology. A Cloud-hosted multi-site, multi-tenant software exchange, Celona’s MOXN technology simplifies operations and manageability by removing cumbersome and costly hardware burdens. With MOXN, mobile subscriber traffic is aggregated and securely tunnelled to the MNO core network, making the entire experience completely seamless to users while guaranteeing subscriber service level agreements and KPIs for each MNO’s public cellular service.
Celona Neutral Host can be deployed and operational in a fraction of the time at nearly half the cost compared with legacy distributed antenna systems (DAS), which gives enterprises unrivalled control and management over in-building public cellular services. The solution is under enterprise IT’s control, without the burden and cost of additional on-site equipment. Celona offers enterprises flexible deployment and pricing options that allow neutral host to be easily enabled on existing Celona private wireless networks or discretely deployed as a standalone solution for neutral host only services.
Private wireless neutral host solutions are well suited for healthcare environments, large retailers, offices, hotels and universities. Stanford plans to expand the deployment of private 5G neutral host networks to multiple buildings across several sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Stanford Health Care is pioneering advancements in healthcare, dedicated to enhancing the experience and the outcomes for our patients and clinical staff,” said Christian Lindmark, CTO of Stanford Health Care and Stanford School of Medicine. “Beyond ensuring reliable public cellular connectivity within our facilities, we envision utilising this platform to establish a secure private wireless network dedicated to essential medical technologies, including clinical communication, patient monitoring and clinical video streaming.”
“Celona Neutral Host represents a significant advancement in enterprise connectivity and is an even more compelling solution now that AT&T has joined,” added Mehmet Yavuz, Co-Founder and CTO, Celona. “Due to their rigorous test and certification process, AT&T can ensure their customers receive the superior cellular service they expect. And enterprises simply sign one contract with Celona. It’s fast, simple and cost effective.”
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