Ever wondered about the future of connectivity and the role of private 5G in enterprise networking? This episode guarantees to satisfy your curiosity as we unravel the immense potential of private 5G. We're excited to bring you insights from Hardik Jain, CTO and co-founder of GXC, and Mark Houts from the State of Utah, who impart their first-hand experiences building a private cellular network. They illuminate the enhanced capabilities of private 5G such as mobility, spectral efficiency, superior coverage, and power level adaptability which surpasses the offerings of unlicensed spectrum standards.
We dive deeper into the intriguing aspects of private cellular security and how it stacks up against private Wi-Fi. You'll also get a peek into the world of mesh networking architecture for 5G. Our guests break down enhanced security features of private cellular networks such as end-to-end encryption and the ability to lock a SIM card to a specific device. Plus, we'll explore the integration of firewalls and sassy security tools into private cellular networks, offering you a look into GXC's ongoing efforts and their collaboration with the US Navy. Tune in and join us on this enlightening journey into the world of private 5G in enterprise networking, revealing its numerous benefits and its pivotal role in the future of connectivity.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Ever wondered about the future of connectivity and the role of private 5G in enterprise networking? This episode guarantees to satisfy your curiosity as we unravel the immense potential of private 5G. We're excited to bring you insights from Hardik Jain, CTO and co-founder of GXC, and Mark Houts from the State of Utah, who impart their first-hand experiences building a private cellular network. They illuminate the enhanced capabilities of private 5G such as mobility, spectral efficiency, superior coverage, and power level adaptability which surpasses the offerings of unlicensed spectrum standards.
We dive deeper into the intriguing aspects of private cellular security and how it stacks up against private Wi-Fi. You'll also get a peek into the world of mesh networking architecture for 5G. Our guests break down enhanced security features of private cellular networks such as end-to-end encryption and the ability to lock a SIM card to a specific device. Plus, we'll explore the integration of firewalls and sassy security tools into private cellular networks, offering you a look into GXC's ongoing efforts and their collaboration with the US Navy. Tune in and join us on this enlightening journey into the world of private 5G in enterprise networking, revealing its numerous benefits and its pivotal role in the future of connectivity.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, Evan Gerstel here with another great discussion with GXC, making Enterprise 5G simple. Gentlemen, how are you?
Speaker 2:Doing well, doing great Good.
Speaker 1:Good to see you both. We're going to have a really interesting discussion on real-world scenarios for making wireless in the Enterprise 5G simple and demystifying some of the topics around Enterprise 5G. But first let's do some quick introductions here. Hardik, cto, co-founder at GXC, maybe just introduce yourself briefly For those who are not aware who is GXC.
Speaker 3:Yeah sure, my name is Hardik Jain. I'm one of the co-founder and CTO at GXC, based in Austin, texas. Gxc is a small company commercializing Enterprise Private 5G. We're bringing all the good benefits of cellular to an Enterprise networking space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super excited. We're going to really dive a little deeper today. Mark, from Salt Lake, I believe. Mark, how are you? Who are you?
Speaker 2:I am State of Utah, Mark Houts. I just work in the A&A side. I work for the State of Utah. We've been building a private cellular network for several years, Actually started before CBRS became available. We were looking for using some different spectrum options that we had, but we ended up moving over CBRS and just got my name out of there, started blogging about what I was learning about this and it took off and I became invited to this conversation.
Speaker 1:Great. We're excited to have you here with some real, hands-on, real-world insights into what's happening, because there's a lot of questions that folks have and a lot of confusion about this space. I think let's dive right in Hardik. Let's start with some basics Private cellular, one-on-one maybe. How is Private 5G different from current available unlicensed spectrum standards? What's different? What's new? What's unique?
Speaker 3:Yeah, enterprise cellular is. I consider this as the new third stack that enterprise networks that enterprises can use in their network. It's like having your own cellular network and bringing in all the good features of cellular networking, like mobility, spectral efficiency, having a much better coverage, enhancing the capabilities on the access point side. For example, in case of Wi-Fi or other unlicensed technologies, you have radios that operate only in one power level Cellular. You have multiple different levels of transmissions that you can do. So all the way from 200 milliwatts to 40 watts or even more. So bring all of these things could benefit, especially areas of enterprise networking which were not addressed before from a connectivity perspective, for example, campuses, outdoor environments, warehouses, shop floors, etc. Where connectivity has always been a challenge before, not rightly addressed using other technologies. So this blends in, complements that and becomes a part of the tool set.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's super exciting. Mark, tell us about your environment. What's different or unique about it? Why bother with private 5G versus all the Wi-Fi solutions that are out there? Okay?
Speaker 2:So we got interested in this, in reaching kids at home. I work with the school in the city, utah, and the idea of reaching kids at home. We started this before COVID. Pre-covid, we had a network we were trialing to reach kids at home. The idea actually started here in Utah by one of my good buddies. Jason and I are at Murray School District, but that's where it started and then we had a very, very small network and then COVID hit and that kind of accelerated the project.
Speaker 2:Okay, we've got multiple districts that are reaching kids in their homes, providing connectivity, that closing that digital divide. Our interests really are reaching that off campus in a lot of ways, but we're very much as well interested in that efficient spectrum usage. Wi-fi just really does not handle spectrum very cleanly. Private cellular does. I'm very interested also in the scheduling ability. I can guarantee an application that the traffic will arrive, I know when it will arrive and I can guarantee, whereas Wi-Fi it may be a few milliseconds late, it may have to be retransmitted. This technology really provides scheduling and some efficiency with that spectrum. That just knocks it out of the park compared to Wi-Fi. Then, lastly, the ultra-reliability 5G if we get into the standalone cores and all that. When we finally get to that level, there's going to be a lot more reduced latency, ultra-reliable activity compared to Wi-Fi that you just cannot get when you're sharing spectrum with Wi-Fi.
Speaker 1:Yeah, best effort at best, when hard I can. Is this a typical environment use case for private 5G? You must have just a ton of different use cases, environments across the board, different industries. 5g can fit most environments, would you say.
Speaker 3:Indeed, this feels like early days of Wi-Fi, where there could be multitudes of use cases in almost every application. You could get benefit from this, and in different environments. The use cases that we are focusing on, or we're getting a lot of progress on, is industrial manufacturing, warehousing, smart agriculture, mining, oil and gas. It's a mix of outdoor environment, industrial RF, challenging environments. We're typically RF signals that have tough time, so complementary to environments that are not so well by Wi-Fi or by public networks, so fix in there. These are also some of the environments where there hasn't been a good connectivity solution for a very long time, and so use cases for us would be connected, like IT operations, enterprise operations, all the way from connecting handsets to tablets, to robots, to forklifts, to certain vehicles, trucks, cameras, sensors or backhauling sensors. We're also seeing private cellular used as a method of connecting a lot of the other technologies Like, for example, private wireless acting as a backhaul for Bluetooth, lora, zigbee, wi-fi and acting as a connecting fabric, especially in environments that I talked about.
Speaker 1:Wow, lots of versatility. That's really interesting, mark. I mean, how does this private 5G network coexist with Wi-Fi? I assume you're not just getting rid of your Wi-Fi network. This is just another opportunity for more and different connectivity, is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. In the industry we've always had the Wi-Fi engineer right. That's been a title a lot of people have taken over the years. That title is kind of evolving. The groups I'm part of I'm very much involved in the Wi-Fi community and in those communities they are trying to learn Lora WAN, trying to learn BLE either, trying to learn private solar. It's becoming, it's change the the industry is changing from.
Speaker 2:Just to focus on Wi-Fi was really our only option in a lot of ways previously for connecting our devices wirelessly to more of a niche Moro and fits for this use case. Private seller fits for this use case. Wi-fi for this use case use different spectrum and so they don't interfere with each other and so it's really they're becoming complementary in In most. In a lot of ways, in some ways they are competing though as well. You can use private cellular, you can use why and Depends Wi-Fi is probably gonna be deeper and so, in a lot of ways, use Wi-Fi in that. In a lot of cases there's places Wi-Fi struggles. Private seller exceeds, excels in those locations and so especially, particularly in the outdoor Use cases, and so it's better to use private seller in that case, and so you kind of just need to look at the use case, where, then, what the need is, and understand the Limitations of the technologies and their benefits and kind of just put them where they work best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fit for purpose, always a good you know philosophy, I guess. And hard it. There are many variables, including, you know price, performance, cost. I mean how do you see that generally when you look at you know X number of Wi-Fi access points and Y number of you know 5G Base stations? I mean how does that look typically in a deployment, economics wise?
Speaker 3:I'll see like, given the optimization that are that have happened over the decades in the 5G stack For foreign kind of an indoor use case, the ratios four to one, so like a cellular access point could cover the same area as four Wi-Fi access points and still maintain the number of users and and capacity.
Speaker 3:For outdoors it is much, much more. It could be 10 to 1 or 20 to 1 on sub case, 50 to 1, right, given again the the capability that the cellular has to go higher power levels, right. And so we think of kind of like a cost per square foot. In some cases it could be cheaper than Using Wi-Fi. I mean, especially we as a company, what we're kind of targeting space where when other technologies like Wi-Fi may not be a good solution To this, and so so it really complements, I also feel like Private 5G when we can use 5G, for with higher bandwidth it could, it could start to compete with Wi-Fi in what we call it as a corporate environment, like a company, as a corporate environment, like office space, etc. But today 5G does a pretty good, pretty, pretty decent job, job of Connecting and providing connectivity in the corporate space especially yeah, one.
Speaker 1:One great story I heard was you know you had a big concert or outdoor event, I think, and you just put one GXC unit kind of covered the whole event and and people were pretty happy with you know pretty, pretty wide coverage outdoors. So that sounds just Different than your usual concerts or outdoor. They're very nice. Let's talk security a little bit. I mean early Wi-Fi networks and a lot of security issues. I think it's possible to deploy Wi-Fi in a secure manner, but it's like there's also a lot of misconfiguration or Weak security deployed. Maybe I should go to Mark, because you're kind of on the hook for these kind of topics. I Mean talk about security differences between 5G and private Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2:When it comes to security. Everybody tells that private 5G is way more secure and all this stuff, things, and it's not entirely true. It depends upon how you implement it. If you have a WPA enterprise Wi-Fi network that's running ETLS, you're pretty, pretty secure. The benefits the benefits with private cellular comes down to when it comes to security the traffic is always encrypted. It is tied to a single Sim and that sim, for the most part, can't be copied, can't, will not join the network. But that sim is also a physical device that I can take out of my iPhone or out of my laptop or whatever device and put in my phone and all of a sudden I'm on the network. And so there's a lot of additional pieces when it comes to security that need to be about and considered, especially on the infrastructure side. There is the ability with the SIMs to lock it to an ICC ID at one of the SIMs on your phone or your or whatever. That allows you to lock it down. That helps prevent those issues.
Speaker 2:But you need to consider some of the other pieces. Over the air you can't really break that encryption, but when you're running a WPA3 enterprise it's the same with E-TLS. You cannot break the encryption. They're very comparable in that regard, but at the end of the day, they both have their issues. And when it comes to private 5G, compared to private LTE, there's additional piece that comes out With private LTE. There's your MC number. It's an identifier on your phone. You can use that and track where devices with private LTE or private 5G. They're actually fixing that issue. We're progressing as an industry, making these technologies better and better as we go, so they're getting comparable, but ultimately private 5G, if done properly, can be a lot more secure than Wi-Fi.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, hardik, you've been involved in a lot of the security deployments and discussions. I think publicly you announced a big project with the US Navy, so privacy and security for those government agencies, particularly in the DOD, is super important. What's your thinking there? What's the approach at GXC to security?
Speaker 3:Yeah, indeed, and I agree with a lot of things that Mark mentioned, Like SIM cards, both in virtual form as well as physical form, kind of the credential to get onto the network for cellular, and features like locking it to a particular device or even allowing it to provision, they, provision with protocols that enterprises already use, like radius, saml2, etc. Providing and the, the. The ecosystem is evolving in terms of providing that. We provide some of those to our customers so that they can use the same identity engine, service management engine, etc. The whole, like the goal of security is, is A lot of integration with the existing security tools that enterprises, enterprises use, like like the management engines, plus firewalls, sassy, etc.
Speaker 3:Combining that with the inherent security that the cellular stack or what could be, could be super powerful. It may not be just, it may not just suffice with what, what it comes because it was primarily built for For telecommunication operators Use as an authentication mechanism to get on, get on to their network. So I would say a lot like a lot of more work that that need to happen and and and we've done some of that work, working with Some of our customers. We also participated in a DARPA's Open source, programmable secure 5g program, which is like all about kind of security vulnerabilities on the networking stack, as well as Helping them find attack vectors, both on the public network as well as private network, understanding vulnerabilities of Of the current encryption as well as authentication algorithms. But I would say we're all for private cellular it's it's generally Like, as we're evolving crude, and to integrate a lot of these things to the tool sets that that the industry is already using to secure the current existing networking infrastructure brilliant.
Speaker 1:Now, on the architecture side, something is co-founder and see, you know You're intimately involved with. Tell us about your approach on mesh networking, and I've heard of mesh networking for the home. I think I actually need it because my Wi-Fi doesn't reach across the house, but you know this is kind of unique to 5g. Is the idea of a mesh Maybe? Describe the architecture for us and I'll ask Mark about how he might be using it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we we are. We're taking the the the same concept as being used for Wi-Fi today to do access point mesh and then Bringing it to cellular and so. So essentially you could have. So using our architecture, you can have certain nodes, certain access points which have we can have wired backhaul and Then other access points that would mesh with this wired backhaul and we enable it using Some filtering technology that we developed, earlier part of the company, and that allows us to do this at the same on the same frequency Spectrum, like you do CBRS backhaul, cbrs access for mesh, so you don't have to use two different frequency spectrum like, like Wi-Fi typically does, 2.4 gigahertz backhaul for mesh and then 5 gigahertz access, so otherwise we're sour, or two different channels etc.
Speaker 3:And so that allows this significantly accelerates deployment, especially in environment where backhaul is not available or deploying backhaul is very challenging or expensive. Permit to make that happen and so Like it kind of ties in with our goal of, like, accelerating private 5G adoption and and builds an architecture, builds a more scalable architecture. So deploy faster, scale faster, provide 100% coverage on day one. We've had use cases for for for machine nodes which could be get close to 200 meters and then you could go as far as a few miles, like we've had two, two, two and a half miles away from the main node, and it really depends on applications or applications on how we want to use that and having a mesh in the same technology, like you need doing cellular backhaul, cellular access allows you to kind of transfer or bring in all the benefits of cellular. So it's not like there's any penalty on latency or a bandwidth et cetera. You just kind of start complimenting other technologies that are out there.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and Mark, have you deployed this mesh network in your network?
Speaker 2:I have not. I'm not using GXC stuff, they're the only one doing it right now. I've thought about specifically doing mesh and because of the spectrum scheduled it actually should handle I haven't seen it in action but it should handle it a lot better than, say, your Wi-Fi one at home, because your Wi-Fi at home is using the same spectrum. But with how Wi-Fi works it plays what a lot in the industry call the game. A game where they devices have to choose, or when they talk With prior to cellular, it's all scheduled, it all says OK, it's your turn to talk, it's my turn to talk, your turn to talk, I say, I say I talk, and so when it comes to using a mesh, you're scheduling and so the spectrum is much used much more efficiently, and so I see that being a big benefit of why these mesh networks are better than, say, a mesh network. Personally, I avoid mesh networks on the Wi-Fi side In any of my organizations because of those limitations with the Wi-Fi networks, with the cellular, I can see it actually being very beneficial.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. And, mark, I'm just reading your bio here I didn't realize you're not only a network engineer, you're a business owner, a tech blogger. You have all kinds of cool stuff going on.
Speaker 2:You've got your CWI recently.
Speaker 1:You don't like being bored, do you? No, I don't. You've been keeping busy. I've been helping a lot. I see you've been testing out Starlink on top of your Jeep Wrangler. I have to see how that's going. So, yeah, we need to get some GXC units in your hands. It seems soon to try this mesh networking. Well, super exciting. I really appreciate the update, cardiq. What are you excited about over the next few weeks, month or two? You guys have a lot going on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm really excited about accelerating adoption of using private cellular. Cbrs has been super successful in the US. It's excited with some of the things that are going on in other countries and enabling similar private network spectrum capabilities. And also enterprises are more and more using cellular, more and more understanding the benefits that the cellular provides and then starting to adopt it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's exciting times for us in the industry. Do you, gentlemen, mark, have any travel, any interesting trips coming up, any vacations planned with your Starlink on your Jeep, mark, or what's ahead before?
Speaker 2:we get the busy season.
Speaker 3:Back to school season, I guess.
Speaker 2:It is back to school season so this time is kind of busy. Been playing with a lot of private 5G and LT. At this point I don't have any 5G stuff yet for myself to play with, but I'm working on presentation for WLPC Prague coming up this fall and WLPC Mexico and WLPC Phoenix and lots of speaking opportunities coming up. Talk about what we're learning here with this technology. So just trying to explore and teach people what this technology is useful for and just helping the industry kind of learn, and that's really kind of been my focus for a lot of it. So great.
Speaker 1:Well, we need your help. We need your leadership on the education side. A lot of education to be done here, right, hardik? I mean, this is a paradigm shift from traditional wireless networking and you guys at GXC do a lot on the education side. Things like this, like events. What are you looking forward to? I know there's a big 5G event this fall, but you're involved in many of these standards, bodies and forums and events as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we go to a lot of events both horizontally as well as vertically, so looking forward to participating, and lots of those, like the one coming up in September, is MWC in last week, oh my gosh, I can't believe September is one month away.
Speaker 1:It's unbelievable, yeah.
Speaker 3:And then many other events coming.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, keep up the great work. Thanks so much, gentlemen, for joining and sharing your thought, leadership and insights, much appreciated, and thanks everyone for watching. Feel free to reach out Thank you With any questions, comments, jokes, whatever, on Twitter. We call it that, so take care, thanks. Thank you All. Right, bye everyone.