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Sharing Wireless Networks

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Sharing is caring, your mother told you so, right?

Let’s talk about network sharing, at least using MOCN and MORAN. You see, I took a long class on MOCN and MORAN last month. Why? Because I like to learn about stuff like that. However, it also gave me something to write about that aligns with Private Wireless Networks (PWN) and how they may complement Carrier’s Public Networks (CPN). We all have to work together to make this grow.

I bring this up because I think that shared Radio Access Networks (RAN) for PWNs will be the next wave of builds. I don’t know how we get there if there isn’t a path to making this cost-effective. The upfront cost of a carrier grade network makes most small companies shy away. I feel that there are many solutions to making this work if we can all work together. One way is to share common resources like the core. This is why OpenRAN was an interesting idea, it should solve a lot of these issues once it matures. Not necessarily for carriers but for the PWNs. The CPNs just don’t need this today. 

Why is the use case important now?

We all want to see PLTE and P5G take off, right? Well, to make it work we have to minimize upfront investment. That means we can do one of two things, 1) have the carriers handle the network and trust them to provide the coverage and bandwidth we need, or 2) build our own network with partners. Both can work. 

This use case is for the latter, to provide our own equipment on a limited basis. I don’t see the carriers expanding indoor or campus coverage unless they have a way to get solid payback. They are cringing at trying to cover every building and every campus unless there is a large public venue for them to get something in return. 

However, what is a company where they have their own core and sell the devices to the end users while adding small cells or macro or DAS to cover the campus or building?  It’s not a cheap endeavor.

I was listening to a LightReading podcast where they believe that the venue owner would pay for the network. What I’ve seen is a lot of push back from these venue owners unless it’s a very big venue or customer. There has to be some type of payback for them. That could be a building attracting more tenants or safety concerns or a special use case involving wireless. Most small business owners think Wi-Fi is good enough, it’s very cheap, can ride on the existing internet access, and has no monthly fees involved outside of internet access. 

To address very large venues, like pro American football and basketball stadiums, they generally have a partnership between the carriers and the league. That’s why you see the BIG 3 carriers bragging about the data they handled during a huge event like the Super Bowl. The carriers handle these venues themselves.

For the PWNs, I think if we could find a way for someone to subsidize the network and sell subscribers or airtime at the same time, then life is good. This is where they may add IoT solutions as well, but I may be pushing it.

One thing I could see is an MVNO adding radios for a carrier to improve a business’ coverage and having that building or company use them exclusively. That makes sense to me.

If you need privacy and coverage, then this would be the way to go.

Luckily, if they do need spectrum, we have CBRS spectrum in the states that we could use in addition to or in lieu of the carrier’s spectrum. 

To me these ideas make sense and they are being tested today. 

Again, the real drawback of PLTE and P5G is the upfront costs and the monthly recurring. All of this adds up to becoming an obstacle to budget conscious customers. 

What is MOCN?

Multi Operator Core Network. This is where a RAN is built and multiple cores are connected to it. One RAN, multiple cores sharing the same spectrum. Technically, once it leaves an MVNO’s core it’s in the RAN and spectrum owner’s network. There is a handoff from MVNO to the carrier. 

From a financial perspective, it makes sense. However, Cores are not easy nor cheap to build, unless you’re doing data or IoT only. It’s not nearly as expensive as adding voice. Voice adds complexity and cost.

I look at this as basically every MVNO. I would bet they have their own core with an allocation of numbers and they just ride on someone else’s RAN. Although this is not a hard and fast rule, there is more to it than that.

Some MVNOs use the carrier’s core with an agreement. They have their logo appear on the UE and they have agreements in place for user plans and numbers. This is using the carrier’s core, not MOCN.

Some MVNOs use their own core but rely on the carrier’s core for some services. They build some core services but may hand off to the carrier for other services. Consider this MOCN lite, almost MOCN but with only one calorie. 

Then some have their own core and connect to a carrier’s network. This would allow the MVNO to roam onto multiple RANs or migrate from one of the big carriers to another assuming the contracts align. It all comes back to the contract, right?

Why use MOCN? If you are willing to invest in a core, then you don’t have to build a RAN. It saves you so much money. Also, you could expand to a new region using another Mobile Network Operator (MNO) to expand instantly. That won’t be free but you have instant expansion without the investment in building the RAN.

This is a quick way to market if you have a core, but I am not saying building a core is easy or cheap. 

If you look at who has data only cores today, outside of the carriers, you would see that Microsoft Azure and Google both offer data only cores. Azure may have 5G voice, but I am not sure. They already have agreements with the big carriers so that would be a shortcut to a larger data network if you’re interested. 

Nokia has NDAC, which they connect private networks to through their network. 

All these options will work with a partner or a network of partners.

What is MORAN?

Multi Operator Radio Access Network. This is a little more complicated in my opinion, but still, it’s a thing being used today.

Imagine BaseBand Units (BBUs), and radios are in one area but they are shared by multiple owners and each owner owns their spectrum. While the RAN is shared, the cores remain separated. 

One of the best examples I have is KDDI and Softbank in Japan, where they share the RAN yet each has their own spectrum and core. The only thing being shared here is the RAN. 

What is the difference?

Pay attention, I am going to sum it up then move on.

  • MOCN means each provider has their own core and beyond the core, one person has the RAN and spectrum. So, if you’re an MVNO, you own the core but have no control over the RAN or spectrum. You’re riding on the back of the RAN and spectrum owner. The good news is you don’t maintain or upgrade the RAN, the RAN owner does that. Each carrier has their own core but the RAN and spectrum are shared.
  • Whereas MORAN means you each have your own core, like MOCN, and you share the RAN, like MOCN, but you each have your own spectrum. Your cores do not have to necessarily talk to each other. There has to be some mechanism in place to coordinate the RAN to work with each core and schedule for each slice of spectrum. Basically, you own the core and the spectrum, but someone else may own and maintain the RAN, unless it’s yours and you allow others to ride on it. So, the RAN is shared, but not the cores nor the spectrum. The RAN has to be able to communicate in both spectrum bands. 

It’s a little easier to understand now. To me it all comes down to what your initial investment will be. You will need to understand your investment into these 3 things:

  • The core, either way you need a solution for the core unless you plan to outsource it. You will have to understand what features you will offer, do software upgrades and feature enhancements, pay licensing fees, maintain it, and so on.
  • The RAN, and I am including the backhaul. This is the most expensive part of any network. The initial installation and deployment. Then the maintenance, leasing, backhaul costs, insurance, contractors, software upgrades, licensing, and more. 
  • The spectrum. This could be a huge cost up front. Look at what the carriers paid. It’s insane, and you can’t just file a license anymore. At least the US has CBRS which helps a lot. The carriers got a piece of that for a price. 

When looking at the above items, you have to decide what you’re willing to invest in. 

You can see some commonalities. These things will be common:

  • Sales and customer service. 
  • Employee expenses.
  • Provide UE devices and support.
  • Keep up with upgrades and licensing fees.
  • Licensing fees.
  • Normal business costs like the website, marketing, promotions, etc.

So there you have a breakdown of the models. 

Sharing, not Slicing.

There is a thing called Network Slicing, specifically in 5G. If you have a 5G Stand Alone, (5GSA) network, like T-Mobile USA does, then you can offer Network Slices to the customer. I am bringing this up to show the difference and how they are not the same, although they could be used together.

Network Slicing is when you take an existing network, let’s use T-Mobile’s US 5G network in this case since they’re already advertising this, and look at what they can do with slicing.

They can take a piece of their network all the way from beginning to end and slice it off for a specific use case or customer. What does this mean?

  • You could break it off for a customer so that instead of a VPN, (in theory), you could have a slice go all the way from the end user’s device back to the customer’s location in a different location in the world.
  • You would allocate a specific amount of spectrum for a use case, like video. That means that a specific amount of bandwidth and spectrum could be reserved for a device or user. So that use could have 10MHz of B41 spectrum and have bandwidth of 20Mbps allocated all the way from the RAN, through the backhaul, into the core or to the internet. However it’s set up. In the TMUS Red Bull event, they allocated 276 Mbps for video.
  • Each slice could be use case specific and give the carrier complete control over the slice.

So when using MORAN, each carrier would have their own spectrum and could do whatever they wanted in their own spectrum as long as the RAN could handle the use case.

Whereas MOCN is going to allow the MVNO to connect to the RAN but the owner of the RAN has complete control over what your subscribers can do, how much bandwidth they get, and how they connect. However, the MVNO could secure a network slice and that may offer more guarantees to end users if the RAN owner agrees.

FYI – TMUS opened up a Network Slice Beta for Developers. Pretty cool, right?

I am thinking this could be a solution for the carrier to break apart the spectrum and network to offer public and private networks in the same building. This could offer a Private Network as a Service, (PNaaS). So essentially any carrier could offer a customer a “private network” if they’re willing to pay a monthly cost so that it would fit more budgets compared to paying for all the equipment up front. The carrier may get the benefit of having their coverage where it wasn’t and the business owner would get the best of a private network alongside the carrier’s public network, if they wish. Why not?

What is a core?

It just hit me, many of you may not understand what the core is. So, I thought I would spend a few moments letting other vendors explain what it is. 

To me, it’s basically the control center for the network. It may be tailored for 4G or 5G or both. It may allow Wi-Fi connectivity and other cores to connect to it. It also has all the billing, subscriber, user, feature, and functionality information in it. It is the master controller of the network that delegates its information off to the rest of the network.

  • To Celona, “5G Core (5GC) is the heart of a 5G network, controlling data and control plane operations. The 5G core aggregates data traffic, communicates with UE, delivers essential network services and provides extra layers of security, among other functions”
  • Nokia says, “The core has been the beating heart of the network since the early days of the telephone when it served as the manual switching board, allowing operators to route calls to where they needed to go. When we think of a modern mobile network, that switching functionality remains, but it’s become a lot more complex.”
  • Ericsson says, “5G Core (5GC) is the heart of a 5G mobile network. It establishes reliable, secure connectivity to the network for end users and provides access to its services. The core domain handles a wide variety of essential functions in the mobile network, such as connectivity and mobility management, authentication and authorization, subscriber data management and policy management, among others. 5G Core network functions are completely software-based and designed as cloud-native, allowing higher deployment agility and flexibility on multiple cloud infrastructures.”
  • Rajarashi Pathak has a nice technical overview if you’re interested. 

As you can see, everyone above says it’s the heart of the network, but I don’t quite look at it that way. It is really the brains of the network. It also has the heart and lungs breathing life into it while the backhaul is the connection to the RAN like your nervous and cardiovascular systems while the RAN is the eyes, ears, and muscle of the network. (Is that graphic enough for you?)

Moving on.

Would carriers do this?

I think so because of how they had rural coverage in the early days. Do you know how? Spoiler alert, no one had coverage that covered the entire nation!! What they did was create roaming contracts with rural carriers. There may or may not have been spectrum sharing involved, it all depended on the agreements.

In the early days of wireless, right up until about 10 years ago, the big carriers, including Sprint, had roaming agreements that would allow them to roam onto a frenemy. Sprint would roam onto a smaller carrier or even a competitor like AT&T or Verizon. In fact, LTE made it even easier. Why? It was a common technology. Why is that important? Because in the ancient days of 3G (and 2G, but I don’t want to date myself), we had multiple technologies like GSM and CDMA. It was a cruel and competitive world where roaming was not as easy in the early days. UE devices eventually had almost every technology in every device. Moving forward they will just need LTE and NR in their devices. Eventually LTE goes away, maybe 5 years form now. 

Hell, we even had iDEN which was a Motorola proprietary technology used by Nextel. Remember Nextel? If you were in the industry for longer than 15 years then chances are good you had a Nextel device at some point. We loved them until we didn’t, which was after Sprint shut down Nextel’s iDEN network. Those were the days. Oh the joys of Push-To-Talk (PTT). It was so popular that Verizon and AT&T were trying to get it to work on CDMA and GSM.

Fortunately, device makers made smaller chips and crammed more and more technology into each device. The evolution of wireless technology is amazing. 

Then, along came LTE, which was adopted worldwide by carriers and device makers. So ends the days of true technology competition. From here on out we use LTE and NR for most everything carrier related. I feel with the rise of LTE, then 5G, it was the end of competing technologies and true hardware technology competition. It made the world an easier place to deploy, but the owners of LTE and 5G patents had to get creative because now it was about features and nuances. 

History may repeat itself on a smaller scale and without roaming fees. 

Sharing of networks was actually quite common in the carrier’s world. For those of you born before 1999, you may remember roaming fees. If you’re my age, roaming was a curse word. When you saw roaming fees on your wireless bill, I literally would start swearing like I had Tourette’s Syndrome! OK, maybe it was just me. 

You have to admit it, you never knew what your wireless bill would be in the early days, did you? Roaming fees, pay for each minute, then the overages had a higher fee. This is why roaming became a curse work in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I am starting to get angry just thinking back! I need to move on.

So roaming was common. This was complicated in the old days, you know, before the internet. Now we can connect using a VPN or some other way to virtually connect to our customer or frenemy. Life got easier and more complex at the same time. 

Don’t leave me this way!

The one thing that I think may be hard is the breakup. What if one of the partners goes solo? Well, let me tell you about the BIG 3 carriers and many rural smaller carriers. 

So let’s use BIG 3 as the national carrier and RURAL as the small rural carrier.

One day, BIG 3’s coverage was nearly complete in urban and suburban markets. So what they did was expand into rural markets where they were paying roaming fees to RURAL. 

BIG 3 started pulling back their shared spectrum, which RURAL relied on for income unless they had their own sales teams. Some did and some didn’t, but as you know all larger carriers have sales offices everywhere. 

Once their sites were up the customers’ User Equipment (UE) would move to BIG 3’s Base Transceiver Station (BTS) and eliminate roaming fees for that area. 

Carriers made this happen because they built out in rural areas. They would build out a network 

How did this happen? Most larger carriers had the funding to build in rural areas and then migrate. They knew that LTE was the path forward so that made the future pretty clear. Roaming expenses dropped in those markets. They had to build and maintain, but it was their equipment so they had assets in nearly every market.  

Now with the 5G investments, BIG 3 is going to break away from the smaller carriers altogether. The smaller carriers have been selling off markets, assets, spectrum, just to get by. It’s not a secret that competition is brutal and the larger carriers hold the aces. 

The larger carriers no longer need the rural carriers. T-Mobile did a great job building out their 600MHz spectrum nationwide. 

So, what happened to the smaller rural carriers, most got bought up and others went bankrupt closing their doors for good. They could not afford spectrum thanks to the auctions and they became takeover targets. 

MOCN and MORAN in the carrier world:

For those of you wondering if the carriers would use MOCN, well the Sprint & TMUS merger relied on this to connect the cores very quickly and then migrate users over to the TMUS RAN. as explained in this FCC document I found on the SEC site. If you open it up, save yourself time and just search for MOCN unless you enjoy sifting through 125 pages of words. Hey, if that’s your thing, go crazy, I’m just saying, the search takes you to where you need to go. 

OK, maybe not so common in the US, yet, but in Canada, it’s been used by Rogers for some time. I don’t think it’s as competitive there as it is in the US so they encourage saving money by sharing. Again, sharing is caring, isn’t it? In Europe, it is more common but very region-specific. 

MORAN is also used by carriers, look at Japan where KDDI and Softbank share RANs. 

What will PWNs do with this?

So here is the thing. We already have many PWNs for IoT purposes. They are used all the time, but not using any CBRS spectrum except in specific cases where the use case defines it. We use LoRa, WiFi, BLE, and other “free” spectrum. It works, why mess with it. Even Amazon has the SideWalk which seems to work well for what it’s intended to do. 

Pretty cool right? However, as stand alone networks, it is hard to make money off of any of these. Why, they are very limited in devices and coverage. Free spectrum has its limitations.

So the FCC released CBRS spectrum which I still think will open up new use cases. It has the potential to mix broadband and IOT together in private networks. However, the only use case we’ve really seen so far is for outreach programs that need FWA because fiber is too expensive and the carriers have nothing in those areas. 

What is the huge obstacle? It appears to be the price of a carrier grade network. Most PWNs are expensive compared to Wi-Fi or BLE. Not just the upfront CapEx costs, but also the ongoing OpEx costs. This is more than most companies want to pay unless they have a specific use case and the budget makes sense. 

Today’s list includes port solutions, education outreach, larger enterprise networks, county wide networks, manufacturing, and more larger companies and governments because they had the money to drive PLTE networks along with a viable use case.

Lately I have been hearing about mid size venues that may build their own networks and offer roaming to the carriers. 

Celona has an agreement with T-Mobile to connect their network to T-Mobile. That would mean they could add one of their customers to the T-Mobile LTE network today, and 5G, using Multi Operator Exchange Network (MOXN). I really don’t know what MOXN is other than it’s cloud based.

I was hoping the BIG 3 would open up their networks for smaller MVNO operators. It would make sense. I am not sure what it would take to get an agreement with the BIG 3 but I would think it’s a minimum amount of subs and time. 

One thing the carriers might be afraid of is becoming a wholesale network provider when they can go direct to the customer. I am not sure which business  model makes more sense but I would think the margin to the customer would be better than a wholesale margin. However, it would be nice to scale back the number of brick and mortar stores you have and do business online or with large customers only. That may be the dream! Mint Mobile and Visible MVNOs both grew without brick and mortar stores, all online sales and plenty of marketing. 

So now you know the differences between MOCN and MORAN. You know the difference between sharing and slicing. 

Acronyms:

  • 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technologies.
  • 5GNSA is Non Stand Alone 5G network and that means that it’s anchored to the 4G network imposing 4G limitations to the 5G network. Yes, 5G wants to be set free!
  • 5GSA is 5G Stand Alone meaning that you have the full functionality of 5G features without being held back by 4G limitations. 5GSA is setting 5G free to be who it really is, like you finding yourself. 
  • B41 is Band 41 spectrum, mostly owned by T-Mobile in the USA and covers most of the 2.5GHz spectrum, roughly 100 to 120 MHz of bandwidth. 
  • BIG 3 is T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.
  • BTS is the Base Transceiver Station used in the RAN.
  • CBRS is Citizens Broadband Radio Service, generally 3.5GHz range mostly used in the USA as lightly licensed spectrum.
  • CPN is Carrier’s Public Network.
  • FCC means Federal Communication Commission, and if you’re reading this and don’t know who they are, you may want to look for another line of work.
  • FWA means Fixed Wireless Access.
  • G means Generation, we’re up to release 5G, fifth generation wireless format.
  • IOT means Internet of Things.
  • LTE is Long Term Evolution (4G).
  • MNO means Mobile Network Operator.
  • MOCN is a Multi Operator Core Network.
  • MORAN is a Multi Operator Radio Access Network.
  • MOXN is a Multi Operator Exchange Network.
  • MVNO = Mobile Virtual Network Operator.
  • NR is New Radio, a wireless radio access technology used in 5G.
  • P5G is Private 5G network using NR.
  • PCN is a Private Carrier Network.
  • PLTE is Private Long Term Evolution (4G).
  • PNaaS is Private Network as a Service.
  • RAN means Radio Access Network, basically the radios in the field.
  • UE means User Equipment which is your smartphone or another wireless device that connects to the network.

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