5G business opportunity for Cable Industry

After Verizon launch of 5G Home Connect product, Cable Industry has come under direct competition in their monopolistic ISP market of providing internet services to Home and small businesses. Cable industry needs to create their own 5G product roadmap to counter MNO threat of taking over in-building internet services business.

Mobile Operator’s interest in Home Connect solution is not new. Back in 2G days, Mobile Operators has deployed wireless local loop solution to offer in-building telephony services. Now, with access to mid-band and high-band frequencies and new technology of MIMO and beam-forming, Mobile Operators have the opportunity to offer in-building ISP services and integrate in-building wireless solution as part of their broader out-door network and grow their network coverage in-building. Value-added edge services can be created after substantial foot-print of in-door home-connect customer base is created. Without Cable industry investments, Mobile Operators are all set to eat Cable industry’s lunch and make them disappear or redundant. It is kind of do or die situation for Cable Industry.

5G is a wake-up call and golden opportunity for Cable Industry to “finally” create a business growth opportunity which is much more than acting as a simple ISP with flat ARPU. 5G is a transformation technology for in-building services and applications.

Smart Building

Every building can have multi-MNO neutral-host and private 5G network deployment build on 5G network architecture principles of virtualization, Hardware-software separation, Network-slicing to ensure low cost in-building solution development and operational models.

Smart In-building structures is one of three main pillers of 5G infrastructure (refer my article on 5G). Cable Industry needs to take proactive and bold steps to invest in this opportunity.

In-Building Network Standardization

In-door Wireless coverage is becoming critical services much like electricity and water. Without good wireless network coverage, it is hard for building owner to find tenants. Wireless Network availability inside building requires considerable planning, design and deployment in the same way as plumbing or electrical design planning is done for in-building services. There is a need for “network design” engineers to create in-building wireless and network implementation plan and this needs to become part of building code and green building initiatives.

Conclusion

Mobilestack Inc has the expertise to help Cable Industry in development of 5G product roadmap and development of in-building network standardization efforts. We invite industry stakeholders to connect with Mobilestack Inc and make in-bulding 5G deployment work for Cable Industry advantage and offer new revenue-generating services that are much needed for in-bulding 5G network deployment. Failure to execute on this opportunity is not an option.

DEMO – Low cost LTE solution and vEPC solution

With a demo of LTE-in-a-box solution, Mobilestack Inc announces the availability of a low cost LTE-in-a-box solution and vEPC Solution. Please contact us for product details and customer trials.

Initial LTE release supports 4G LTE network solution with upgrade path available to 5G.

Possible applications include but are not limited to

  • Public Safety markets – Public Safety requires dedicated LTE-network used exclusively by public safety people. Our LTE-solution can be deployed in emergency vehicles using PC based HW platform to create a dedicated LTE-network on demand to connect emergency staff with each other.  In disaster affected areas, when MNO wireless network is not functional, public safety teams need to setup a wireless network to effectively communicate with other and provide relief where needed. Mobilestack LTE-solution is a good fit for these requirements.
  • Rural markets –  Rural markets have unique requirements and ROI challenges. In such markets, our LTE-network can be installed to provide voice and data services in capital efficient manner.
  • Small Cell markets – This solution can be deployed as a small-cell LTE-network serving in-building LTE-network requirements.
  • IoT / IIoT markets – Our low cost LTE-network solution can be used in several IoT market verticals and test-solution for development. For example – Private IoT network for smart city solution, parking lots, industrial IoT application, private LTE-network for Utilities
  • Test Solution market – Chip developers, device developers and compliance test centers can use our LTE-in-a-box solution as test platform.

Our vEPC Solution can be installed on a GPP hardware (such as PC) or public / private cloud as container-based solution. We are looking for customer trial projects for this product. Please contact us for more details.

Examples of Target applications are

  • vMME, vHSS or vSP-GW Solution in MNO network
  • MVNO vEPC solution on demand deployed in  private cloud or public cloud based on customer requiremets
  • vEPC Test Solution as part of lab LTE-network or Mobile Edge Solution testing

DEMO Details:

LTE demo (video below) explains the demo configuration. As part of virtual-eNB implementation, this demo is using software-based 4G LTE PHY, MAC, RRC and PDCP implementation. SDR-card in the demo is used for LTE-frame modulation / demodulation using digital I/Q stream generated by LTE-PHY running on a PC.

This demo also includes a vEPC solution running on a GPP HW (PC). Our vEPC solution is also available for public / private cloud based deployment using docker / LXD container implementation.

In this live demo, we show LTE-in-a-box network connected over LTE air-interface to two commercial UEs simultaneously with both UEs running a speed test.

PC is running software eNB,  vMME, vHSS and vSP-GW  on top of Ubuntu linux. LTE-stack of this demo supports following features:

  • LTE Release 9 Compliance
  • LTE running in FDD configuration
  • Tested bandwidths: 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz
  • Support for 4×2 MIMO
  • Evolved multimedia broadcast and multicast service (eMBMS)
  • Modular support for MAC, RLC, PDCP, RRC, NAS, S1AP and GW layers
  • Detailed log system with per-layer log levels and hex dumps

Please contact for any questions / feedback that you may have. Your feedback is highly appreciated and helpful in improving our products.