It has been more than three years since the FCC first approved commercial deployments of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the 3.55-3.7 GHz band, and more than two years since the agency auctioned Priority Access Licenses to use this spectrum. Early rollouts of CBRS coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which changed the trajectory for this technology. Vendors and analysts had expected to see strong uptake from manufacturers and retailers, but as factories and stores closed down during the pandemic, much of the demand came instead from cities and school districts looking for fixed wireless access solutions to get students online.
But enterprises and their partners have continued to test and study CBRS, and now more of them appear to be investing. Factories appear to be emerging as centers of innovation and experimentation for CBRS. Dow, John Deere, Foxconn and Koch Industries are among the manufacturing giants using private CBRS networks on their factory floors. Continue Reading
Paul Savill, global practice leader of network and edge compute for systems integrator Kyndryl, said manufacturing is the vertical in which his company has won the most CBRS private networks business. He said one reason for this could be Kyndryl’s long standing relationships with world class manufacturers. Kyndryl was spun out of IBM last year.
Freeing factory equipment from fiber or cables makes it faster to implement new configurations, and CBRS generally offers more range and reliability than WiFi. Fewer access points are needed to cover a large area. Savill said Kyndryl and Nokia helped chemical giant Dow cover 10 kilometers of factory space for about a quarter of what WiFi would have cost.
Growth slower than expected
Despite the success of high-profile deployments such as this, overall sales of CBRS radios have fallen short of some initial forecasts. Research firm Dell’Oro has cut its CBRS RAN sales forecasts twice, and now projects less than 5 percent of the North American RAN market will be CBRS gear in 2026.
“We are likely talking tens (not hundreds) of thousands of CBRS LTE/NR BTS shipments this year,” Dell’Oro analyst Stefan Pongratz told Inside Towers. He said many published estimates of shipments include customer premise equipment, but the market for base stations is smaller.
Pongratz said technical and business obstacles have slowed sales of CBRS base stations, and added, “roaming challenges need to be addressed but this is not the primary driver behind the delays.”
Roaming challenges may become more salient as the market extends from large factory floors and warehouses to carpeted enterprise spaces. Vendors are touting CBRS as a superior alternative to WiFi for mission critical enterprise use cases, and these comparisons invite questions about how smartphones (and eventually IoT devices) will move from enterprise networks to public carrier networks. Smartphones that connect to office WiFi networks seamlessly move back to cellular when they leave the building, and enterprise IT managers may reasonably expect CBRS to offer a similar experience.
Veteran telecom industry editor and journalist Martha DeGrasse is an Inside Towers Contributing Analyst with features appearing monthly. DeGrasse owns Network Builder Reports and contributes regularly to several publications. She was formerly a writer and editor with RCR Wireless and a TV business news producer.
By Martha DeGrasse, Inside Towers Contributing Analyst
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