Betacom seeks to simplify CBRS private-network solutions for enterprises

Private 4G and 5G networks are attracting the attention of enterprises that now can explore potential automated Industry 4.0 applications powered by systems provided by Betacom at the Factory Floor Lab of MxD, the nation’s Digital Manufacturing Institute and National Center for Cybersecurity in Manufacturing.

Betacom CEO Johan Bjorklund said that his company has been building telecom networks for more than three decades, but it is now introducing a managed-service offering that is designed to address one of the most significant pain points—lack of 4G and 5G knowledge—noted by enterprises expressing interest in private networks.

“For an enterprise—even though they may be very large—it’s very hard for them to gain this expertise over a very short period of time, so they can deploy and own their own network, let alone manage their own network,” Bjorklund said during a webinar conducted last week about the MxD announcement. “We’re all about private wireless—we deploy, we design, and we manage networks.

“We had a lot of expertise in house already, we gathered that expertise, and then we added the management component to that to allow enterprises to basically build and own their own private wireless network without adding one single headcount to their overall IT department. We take care of all of that seamlessly on the back end for them.”

These sentiments echoed Bjorklund messages about Betacom that he expressed during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“Our business philosophy is really all B2B,” Bjorklund said during the interview. “It’s all about getting 4G and 5G networks into the hands of enterprises, so they can own their own private wireless networks without all of the complexity of having to learn the entire ecosystem around telecommunications, 3GPP technologies and so forth. We’re handling all of that seamlessly, so customers don’t have to add staff to their IT departments.”

Betacom staff members can remotely monitor the performance of customers’ networks, but they do not have access to the content being transmitted across the systems, so the enterprise maintains all of the independence associated with owing a private network, according to Bjorklund.

“We have a network operating center—we call it the SSOC—where we’re basically managing and monitoring all of our networks from a centralized location,” he said. “We’re using a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence for statistical reporting and analysis on our networks, so we’re trying to be as proactive as possible. So, if we start to see trends—things happening in different places—we can take action hopefully before we have an event or outage.

“That’s our value add. An enterprise literally can go to us, and we can be in charge of everything—soup to nuts—but it’s their private wireless network. They can decide what goes on it, and they can use it as much as they want—it’s their network. We’re just behind the scenes managing it, and we have the staff to do that.”

Bjorklund said that this approach also allow enterprises to dictate cybersecurity policies as they wish.

“From a cybersecurity perspective, that means that they are in control of all of their data at all times,” Bjorklund said. “That’s quite appealing to large manufacturers, robotics companies, airports and other companies that we’ve been working with.

“What we’re hearing from a lot of these companies is that they just want to be within their own firewalls, because they can control that environment. That way, it’s just easier for their IT department to know what’s inside, and they don’t have to worry what’s going on outside.”

Bjorklund said that Betacom deployed a 4G network—operating on general authorized access (GAA) licenses in the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band—at the 22,000-square-foot MxD lab facility in Chicago early this year and recently completed a 5G network at the location leveraging the same spectrum.

For years, private wireless networks primarily were limited to using Wi-Fi, but the popular technology is not designed for mobility and does not provide the type of quality-of-service (QoS) and security characteristics that enterprises are seeking for business-critical and mission-critical applications. In contrast, both 4G and 5G are designed as mobile connectivity technologies that support QoS and security as outlined in the 3GPP standards protocol, Bjorklund said.

Whether an enterprise opts for a 4G or 5G private network may depend largely on the type of applications being run and how soon the network needs to be deployed. Bjorklund said that 5G delivers latencies below 10 milliseconds per second, while the latencies associated with 4G private networks can be as large as 80 milliseconds per second.

“My guess is that probably 90-plus-percent of use cases will be satisfied with 4G, because 4G is enough,” Bjorklund said. “But with 5G coming in, now we can add even more use cases with even more requirements on latency, speed, etc.”

In addition to Betacom, other vendor partners participating in the MxD development are Airpan Networks—provider of the new 5G radio access network—and Druid Software, which provides the Raemis 5G core software, according to a press release about the MxD announcement.

“We are delighted to support our partners Betacom at MxD and join this esteemed group of advanced manufacturing technology companies,” Druid Software CEO Liam Kenny said in a prepared statement. “Our Raemis 5G SA platform is ideal for delivering the lowest possible latency and guaranteed (QoS) quality of service data necessary for these Industry 4.0 use cases as this group works towards redefining manufacturing standards globally.”

Some of the companies testing the private-wireless capabilities at the MxD facility include high-profile entities like Dow, Siemens and John Deere, Bjorklund said.

“(MxD) is a lab for these companies to try out new technologies and new processes, with the objective to bring more manufacturing back to the United States,” Bjorklund said, noting that energy costs and supply-chain challenges have generated a greater sense of urgency to established highly automated manufacturing facilities closer to customers.

Tony Del Sesto, a technical fellow at MxD, said he believes companies like Betacom are filling an important role in making private wireless networks practical for enterprises, particularly those that do not have large IT staffs.

“A lot of people don’t realize that 98% of manufacturers in the United States are small and medium-sized businesses, and a lot of them are thinking, ‘I can’t do 5G—that’s only for the larger companies,’” Del Sesto said during the webinar. “But … Betacom has made it easy. They’re managing the install from start to finish. They’re managing the configuration, the commissioning, the testing, the verification and the subcontractors.

“I think that one of the important advancements [for private networking] … is that it doesn’t have to be difficult. Companies like Betacom can make it easy for you. It was really just a matter of interfacing with our cybersecurity and IT teams, making sure that we had configurations—from both a WAN and LAN perspective—to give them remote access, but at the same time, we controlled the access internally.

“So, it’s really the best of both worlds. We had the ease of installation and expertise of Betacom, but we still manage access and security within our own system.”

Airspan COO Glenn Laxdal emphasized enterprises’ need to have the reliable and robust performance from a 4G or 5G private network to support automated business-critical operations.

“You need a wireless network that has mobility, security and precise geotracking of the device that you’re tracking to enable those automated use cases,” Laxdal said during the webinar. “And there are myriad automated use cases, whether you’re talking about smart warehousing, smart manufacturing, oil and gas, mining or transportation.

“There are myriad use cases, and what will happen is that devices—whatever the device is that you want to be controlling—will have 4G and 5G sensors … and those devices will be controlled by the network that we’re creating here.”

This private-network technology could be applied to many types of solutions, but Bjorklund said that Betacom currently is focused on three sectors: logistics, manufacturing and airports/airlines. Bjorklund noted a deployment at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, where private networking enabled more efficient use of baggage-scanning technology.

“We basically managed to increase the efficiency of baggage handling by about 22%.,” Bjorklund said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The final outcome was faster turnaround at the gates for the planes by 22% at Dallas/Fort Worth for American Airlines.”