Federated Wireless has another crack at private networking

US CBRS comms provider Federated Wireless this week launched a private networking service that aims to get customers up and running in just two weeks.

Called Private Wireless-as-a-Service, it comes in both 4G and 5G flavour, and is sold through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, giving enterprises the tools they need to define their use case requirements and the location of their first deployment. Once the customer places their order, Federated Wireless ships out and installs the first private wireless node, and then onboards the customer’s initial connected devices and applications. Once up and running, customers can scale as needed, adding more nodes, users, devices, applications and so-on.

Both capex and opex-based consumption models are available, and customers are not charged based on data usage, so they can roll out bandwidth-intensive applications without worrying too much about costs. And due to Federated Wireless’ use of the shared CBRS band, customers aren’t covering the cost of spectrum licensing fees either.

US-based Federated Wireless doesn’t push a particular supplier’s products either, relying instead on what it calls a partner ecosystem. By doing it this way, Federated Wireless claims it can be tech agnostic, focusing instead on finding the most suitable solution for each use case.

“Our mission, for years, has been very simple. We are making it extremely easy for IT and OT leaders to make their most important new innovations possible with 4G and 5G shared spectrum connectivity,” said Iyad Tarazi, CEO of Federated Wireless, in a statement on Tuesday. “That’s what makes Federated Wireless different. We don’t want to just sell a customer a network. We’re singularly focused on customer success, and that means delivering private wireless solutions that meet their exact requirements and drive real outcomes for the business.”

By the way, if any of this seems familiar, that’s because it is.

In February 2020, Federated Wireless launched Connectivity-as-a-Service, which enabled enterprise customers procure private 4G and 5G networks using AWS as well as Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Comparing this week’s announcements with those from February, there doesn’t seem to be any material difference between what Federated Wireless launched this week, and what it launched a little over two-and-a-half years ago. Telecoms.com has contacted Federated Wireless for an explanation and will update this story if necessary.

One possible explanation is that Federated Wireless didn’t gain much traction the first time round, and therefore this is simply a relaunch with a few tweaks and perhaps some added bells and whistles.

In January, research firm Dell’Oro lowered its outlook for the CBRS RAN market, explaining that adoption was tracking “significantly below” expectations. It expects CBRS RAN revenues to account for less than 5 percent of the North American RAN market by 2026. It previously expected CBRS to take a 5 percent share of revenues by 2025.

January was not the first time Dell’Oro cut its forecast. In late July 2021, it revised down its cumulative CBRS revenue outlook for 2020-2025 from $2 billion to $0.5 billion-$1 billion. Once again, it cited lagging adoption as the main cause.

With CBRS taking longer than expected to gain traction, it could explain why Federated Wireless is launching a fresh assault on the private networking market.

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