Mavenir - Bespoke and Private

One size doesn’t fit all. Mavenir has a range of private network solutions from slices on an MNO’s national network to a private RAN and cloud-based core. We meet Tushar Dhar to learn more.

It’s on, then.

For years, deep trends have been taking place in technology that are only now coming to a head. Networks are turning from the corporate utility that few in an organisation know or care about, to be at the forefront of IT and digital decision making.

The catalyst for the growth of private networks has been the freeing up of spectrum for 5G around the world, says Tushar Dhar, VP of Marketing Strategy and Business Development at Mavenir.

“Fifth generation mobile networks have raised the possibility of what a modern network can do – and made fence-sitters take the decision,” he says. As the industry’s only end-to-end, cloud-native network software provider, Mavenir is one of the fastest growing companies in the sector – a global player accelerating software network transformation for 250+ Communications Service Providers in over 120 countries, which serve more than 50 per cent of the world’s subscribers.

In the UK, blocks of spectrum are being made available for private network use. 5G allows for a much richer and more sophisticated network than 4G, and a deeper integration with an organisation’s existing system. For example, 5G incorporates innovations such as the ability to “slice” networks, so a customer of a major mobile network operator can run their organisation’s data communications under the umbrella of the mobile network operator (MNO).

“Network slicing means an operator can create slices for different customers,” explains Dhar. “In 4G, you can slice the core network for various customers, but it’s not the same benefit as 5G. 5G allows network slicing on the radio network basis or on the packet core basis.”

Network slicing concept has been defined in the 3GPP standards for 5G networks and is capable of large scale implementations. 5G allows the network operator to customise capacity, throughput, coverage by efficiently and dynamically reallocation of resources between different network slices. Each slice can be tailored to a specific use case or business application, for example, Internet of Things (IoT), the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) standard, factory automation and robotics.

5G also increases speeds and capacity, improves reliability and improves the latency to permit critical applications to be run – something that wireless networks could not previously guarantee. In addition, it offers massive IoT capabilities to handle billions of connected devices, and permits exact positioning down to less than a metre. Other innovative capabilities include UPF (User Plane Function) separation in the packet core to allow distribution of the data plane and maintain centralised control. This allows for local break-out thereby handling high bandwidth and low latency application requirements at the edge. What this means is that data and or traffic moves closer to the user at the edge of the network, to increase performance of the most demanding applications.

The digital transformation of enterprises and industries has been underway for some time, and this is now integral part of any business environment. CIOs are recognising that there is an increased need for network platforms to provide context and connectivity for both people and assets. An example of how Mavenir helps make this happen is in Japan, where it’s working with NEC to deliver a 5G open virtualised RAN (vRAN) solution to the Japanese Enterprise Market. This will open up local and private 5G network opportunities for enterprises, regional authorities and other organisations.

Another example is the Moray East off-shore wind farm where telecoms provider Vilicom is providing a private mobile network for operator Vestas. It’s enhanced 4G for now, capable of being upgraded to 5G. This is an unusual case, in that besides providing advanced communications and connectivity for core business operations, it provides workers with a leisure network so they can stay in touch with family via video calls, or stream content whilst at sea. This is an example of a non-traditional network, where Mavenir’s software-defined vRAN has been turned into a practical solution for a vertical sector, in this case maritime.

Mavenir has been working with the leading IoT operator Netmore across a number of opportunities and use cases in the UK and Nordics for providing advanced communications and mobile connectivity; the use cases range from providing AR/VR experience to visitors, live streaming of wedding events, autonomous vehicle use, in-building mobile broadband coverage and multi-tenant neutral host operation.

Last year, Mavenir established a collaboration and joint go-to-market strategy with systems integrator Mugler to provide end-to-end 5G solutions including 5G vRAN, 5G Core & Digital Enablement Platform to the German Enterprise & Industry Market. Mugler will deploy this system on its campus in Oberlungwitz, Germany, to showcase advanced enterprise use cases. Similar strategic cooperation has been set-up with NTT Data and Media Broadcast GmbH to provide solutions and services for private 5G and 4G networks in Germany. NTT Data will also offer its 5G campus network as a showroom solution.

Mavenir has rich set of collaboration and partnership with key technology players. These include:

• Qualcomm Technologies for developing indoor and outdoor Open RAN solutions for both private and public network deployments
• Intel for flexRAN based COTS (commercial off the shelf) system and Smart Edge products
• NVIDIA for launch of AI on 5G hyper converged edge solution for verticals like manufacturing, mining and healthcare that cover Industry 4.0 applications, including Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), Intelligent Video Analytics (IVA) and Extended Reality (XR) and Gaming use cases

Mavenir is also partnering with companies from various industries, public and government authorities, and network operators to support the introduction and integration of private networks including applications and services. The company is also working with CSPs to help their B2B business, such as Vodafone, to provide indoor 4G connectivity for their customers.

“Enterprises want more control and are coming forward and deploying their own networks”, sums up Dhar.

As an example of the new hybrid world, Dhar points to Mavenir’s collaboration with Telefonica and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for providing IoT connectivity services as a private network offering for Telefonica’s business customers using both Mavenir’s packet core solution and AWS’s public cloud infrastructure. 

As well as giving customers greater control, private networks are being installed for new classes of applications. Many of these fall under the buzzword ‘smart city’, which really refers to harnessing data for metropolitan areas for applications ranging from environmental monitoring to traffic management. Previously the data was either not collected at all, or siloed with a contractor or department.  But a smart city private network can start to knit these disconnected parts together.

“The Smart City initiative is an important step towards exploring and find new ways in which technology and data can improve the quality of life of town or city for the people who live and work there,” Dhar thinks. “Every city wants to become connected and efficient, across the city’s administration, its education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, digital innovation and utilities.”

5G networks provide the connectivity required for vast amounts of data to be transferred and analysed. Once transferred in real-time over 5G networks, data can help reduce waste and lower cost, waste, fight crime, and help lower carbon emissions.

Mavenir is working on several initiatives in the UK taking that first step towards becoming smarter.

“Once cities start to think in a joined-up way, they can do much more with their infrastructure. A smart pole delivers not just street lighting but can have a sensor measuring levels of air pollution, and another doing traffic analysis (ANPR),” Dhar explains.  Cities can start exploring the possibilities with 4G networks, but it’s really with 5G that they start to see benefits.

Mavenir will deliver a robust, secure and reliable 5G private network not just to UK cities, but for industry 4.0 applications, modern medicine/e-health, logistics, warehousing and agriculture. The company’s unique software pedigree means customers can manage them with ease from dashboards and portals. 

Mavenir’s Private Network solutions unleash the power of the network to deliver secure, reliable and scalable solutions and unlock the innovative potential of 5G. Mavenir’s end-to-end, cloud-native, open architecture approach to private networks connects people and things through scalable, zero-touch and multi-generational platforms, with on-premise, cloud deployed and cloud hosted options. Trust the future.

Solution Suite

Diversity is the key to understanding this new world. Mavenir sells the expertise to build a private network to enterprises directly, as well as through channel partners. Because networks are richer, using cloud native software with an extremely flexible architecture, Mavenir can run solutions on a public cloud,  private cloud, on customer’s premises – or all three.

Mavenir offers its full portfolio of Multi-G solutions for the Private Networks market to address the needs of Enterprises, Industries and CSPs. This end-to-end 5G system (part of Mavenir’s MavEdge family), based on cloud-first, open architecture principles, is highly suited to address both mass scale private enterprise use cases as well as bespoke high-end use cases for advanced industries. This includes Radio Access, Cloud Core and Digital Enablement Platform.

Mavenir’s MavAir family includes Open RAN products; the disaggregated RAN approach extends virtualisation to the edge of the network and provides strategic differentiation by enabling multisource Remote Radio Units (RRUs) to interwork with the virtualised, containerised, Cloud based software over ethernet Fronthaul (FH), using the O-RAN open interface overcoming the traditional constraints of the proprietary walled garden specifications used by the other traditional vendors.

Mavenir’s MavCore family includes 5G Converged Packet Core solution, based on cloud-native principles, can be retrofitted on EPCs and encompasses all the major 5G core elements, and these functions are implemented as micro-services in containers. The Mavenir 5G Core also combines 4G Enhanced Packet Core (EPC) functionality and offers a ‘Converged Mobile Core’ solution that supports both 4G and 5G subscribers. In addition, the Mavenir 5G Core supports all Standalone (SA) and Non-Standalone (NSA) options.

Mavenir’s MavApps family that includes Digital Enablement platform allows Private Network operators to create a seamless way of abstracting out the complexity of the underlying network, and create a digital app store for enterprise and industry applications – thereby empowering an ecosystem of developers, service providers, technology companies, enterprises and industries to create applications to power digitalisation with 5G.

Guest blog by Mavenir, originally published in the UK5G Innovation Briefing. Follow Mavenir on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

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