In The Arena by TechArena - The Private 5G Revolution with Cellnex

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Cellnex’s Catherine Gull on the state of private 5G deployments and how her company is tapping the technology for deeper engagement with customers.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Catherine Gohl, Head of Product Solutions and Business Development at Cellnex. Welcome to the program, Catherine. Thanks, Alison. I'm really delighted to be here. Cellnex is new to the Tech Arena, so why don't we just start by introducing the company and how you play in the 5G arena? Great. Selnex is a relatively new company in that it went public in 2014 and started out as a tower co. TowerCo. In essence, we own and manage towers across Europe, something like 140,000 towers

upon which mobile operators put their networks. About three or four years ago, we started a diversification business that encompasses everything from distributed antenna solutions and small cells to private networks. And as the years have gone by, and not many years, 5G has become a much more important aspect of this part of the business. Now, I represent the private networks part of the business. Private networks developed in Cellnex through the acquisition of a company called Edscom. And Edscom was undoubtedly the European leader of private networks and in the deployment of private networks. Between them and my experiences as well, there's something like seven or eight, nine years experience between us.

So it's quite exciting that Cellnext has chosen to go forward with this. It's incredible. And I wanted to talk to you about 5G private networks. You know, from all of those towers, you could say that Cellnext has a very good bird's eye view on 5G deployment progress across Europe. And as we move forward in 2023, how do you view that 5G landscape and where are you seeing the most traction in the market? Where we're seeing the most traction and how we see private 5G networks develop is there's a lot of businesses that are looking at private networks and specifically private 5G. The businesses range from industry manufacturing to ports, airports, power station, chemical plants, nuclear plants, etc. The initial kind of drive behind private 5G is really, I think, being spearheaded by those indoor-outdoor campus organizations or companies, and that would be power stations, chemical plants, airports, port, companies like that, and manufacturing plants that have more

than one indoor location. In order for them to do their manufacturing, they're having to move parts and pieces of their manufacturing process from one site to another site on a large site. So I hate to say it, but it's like the indoor-outdoor. The reason why is because that's where things go funny. In a chemical plant, as an example, you've got a lot of very dangerous places where before it was very difficult to get a signal in because you had to put either a Wi-Fi hotspot, not possible if you've got two big chemical tanks, or you had to do something else. With the advent of private 5G, you can have that connectivity generated by that private network in that location safely with what they call an ATEX device that someone might be holding if they're standing there or some sort of IoT device that's giving you the data that you need in order to run your plant. Now, that was a very long answer to your short question. No, it was fantastic. And you described a number of different markets where private 5G

is making sense. Can you give us any examples of companies that Cellnex is working within this space where you've seen, hey, this is exactly what we were describing when we were talking about the promise of private 5G networks and it's coming to life. Absolutely, Alison. So one great example is BASF site in Catalonia in Tarragona. It is one of the largest BASF chemical plants in Europe and perhaps even the world. It covers 100 hectares. It's enormous. What BASF had faced is a huge landscape, a variety of very dangerous things, a chemical plant that's really a kind of a lab, multiple buildings where items have to go and meet other items in order to be constructed together. What BASF found in private 5G is a reliable mechanism for them to not only communicate with all of the people they have on

site, track where they are, but also to do things like employ autonomous guided vehicles or AGVs in order to move parts of the manufacturing line from one building to another building so that manufacturing continues on a regular basis and that you don't have the guy going off on coffee break when you've got something waiting, let's say, for the second part in building number two. It also enabled them to make sure that things were safe and they could block off areas or they could open areas depending on what was going on at the plant. something that will help them transform their business and help them be more efficient. But it is also a defensive move in helping them become more reliable and safer and hopefully stave off some of those little human errors. That's really interesting. I want to go under the covers a little bit because what you've just described

is a use case that pulls on key aspects of 5G capability, whether it's lossless data or distance or throughput. Tell me why you think 5G was the perfect technology for this use case and what core capabilities are there that maybe are not in Wi-Fi or other legacy technologies that give BASF and other customers the ability to deploy with confidence? Things that are not in the Wi-Fi or other worlds is inherent in 5G, or it's inherent in mobile, inherent in 5G, 3GPP security. You can't rock up with a mobile sector. It's really hard and try to dislodge or get into a mobile network. They're just a different level of security. The mobile network, the way that a mobile network works, only the devices that you allow to work on it will work.

So in theory, the private 5G network is secured because you know what's going on on your network. In Wi-Fi, you have the possibility of somebody putting something up in that same spectrum, or yes, Wi-Fi is much more secure than it used to be, but there's a possibility of some sort of Wi-Fi breach. Plus, in the Wi-Fi world, for a place like a port or an airport or a chemical plant like BASF, the number of Wi-Fi hotspots that you would have to deploy and the places that you would have to deploy them would be very difficult to manage, not just to deploy, but to manage. And if you think about things that go on on a port where you've got vehicles driving around and containers swinging here and there,

okay, hopefully they're not swinging too much, but you could potentially every day with a number of Wi-Fi access points that you'd have to deploy to make sure that you were in every corner that a private 5G network would enable you to be, have connectivity in, you might have an outage every day. And that means there's an area of your site that doesn't have coverage the way that you want them to have coverage. So on a very basic level, that's the difference. Now, on a capability level, 5G versus Wi-Fi or other technologies,

if 5G can bring not only the reliability in that it can be designed, network can be designed, so you virtually, you have failover almost everywhere you look. It's private, so everything sits on site and the whole world can fall away and your network can continue to work it has throughput that you need in order to do things like enable cameras for remote control or the throughput that you might need for remote control and for TV cameras, the latency that you'll need for autonomous guided vehicles and other kind of near real-time devices, and also the throughput that you need for the volumes of data that you can collect from IoT-type devices that would be on a site. If you look at a chemical plant as an example, they live and breathe on the amount of data that they can collect. And therefore, the 5G network with the huge amount of capacity that enables is the right way to go to manage something like a chemical.

Thank you for sharing that. You know, when I hear these stories, it's very clear where there's tremendous growth ahead for private 5G. But as we've looked at the news, some infrastructure providers have signaled that growth is slower than originally expected. Do you share their view, or is there anything that could be hindering broad enterprise use at this point? So I think two answers to that question. One, it's the state of the economy, the state of what's going on in the world, and the desire for investment. That's one of the things that's hindering things that are coming. Also, the ability for companies and entities to get the kinds of devices that they need. If you think about

what in the public mobile network, if you're going to produce a device, whatever kind of device it is, in the public mobile network, and you've got demand from millions, hundreds of millions of people for that device. In the private mobile world, you want to produce devices that are fit for purpose for a manufacturing plant. And that device could be the same for a manufacturing plant as it is for a port or an airport. But the number of devices that are necessary at this point for something big that might be, let's say, a special designed tablet that has a certain amount of ruggedization and perhaps anti-fire, an ATEX kind of device that can't blow up in a chemical situation. The number of those devices required in the specific spectrum that a country or a region is offering for private networks is a fraction. And so therefore, device manufacturers are now starting to really focus on producing those devices and that that has been a bit slow. So do I think it's slower than it should be? I do think it's slower than it should be. I've been doing this a long time. I see the transformation potential and I can tell you businesses see the transformation potential. I've seen several

businesses that have written, this underpins our transformation. This actually helps with the lack of staff. As an example, you know, we've heard about truck drivers, lorry drivers, there's just not enough of them. Well, if you can imagine, if you're hired as a truck driver to go up a road a half a mile, down a road a half a mile, all day long, taking a piece of manufacturing to another part of the manufacturing plant for completion. Finding someone to do that is a difficult thing. Getting an autonomous vehicle to do that, a lot more reliable. It's going to go when it needs to go, come back when it needs to come back.

So your question, which was, are things slower than I wanted? I think this last year we found things were slower. I still think that there's a trajectory here. And I believe I'm already seeing in 2023, things really start to move. So be patient. The market will move is really the key message. I profoundly believe that.

I mean, eight years ago, I started, eight, nine years ago, I started, I was hired by a company to say, is this a business? And I went, yeah. The first business that I worked with on this, if you ask them, can we take it down today, nine years later, they will hug it like a teddy bear. And no, it is an integral part now of their business. And they see it growing. And that was obviously in 4G, but it did what it needed to do for them. And now they see 5G.

They see they have no choice but to, you know, new hires, they don't want to drive a crane. You know what they want to do? They want to sit in front of a joystick and drive three cranes remote. Yeah, and what you're describing here is why 5G is so foundational to edge computing and really creating that distributed computing between cloud and edge. And it's so exciting to see it take off. So thank you for sharing where you're seeing the traction and what we should expect. I need to ask you though, we're at Mobile World Congress. Cellnex seems to be all over the place at Mobile World. Tell me what you're showcasing at the show and what you're most excited to see from the industry in Barcelona. So I'm really excited about what Cellnex is doing

at the show. As you know, we are in the tower business, and that means for the infrastructure model that we use in our towers, and it's what we call our augmented tower concept. So it's being able to bring mobile to as many parts of the population as possible through working with our mobile operators. We also have two other really exciting things going on. This one I think you'll really like. So we're doing a 5G broadcast test with three other companies, Rodeshorts, Qualcomm, and ATEM. And it's a pilot project that will allow viewers at the Mobile World Congress to receive live TV and radio content on their mobile phones

with low battery consumption. Oh, nice. So I know. Really cool. I'm really excited for this. Alice and I will email you because we've got to show up for this. I think it's a game changer. And the last thing is, you know, we talked earlier about the GSMA Foundry Innovation Showcase. And we have a project called 5G Catalonia. And we are showcasing seven of our use cases there. High capacity for sending information, low latency, viewing of holograms. I think it's going to be very exciting. Mobile World Congress for me has gotten more and more interesting as industry really steps in. And I think with

Cellnex, what we're doing this year is consumer and industrial. And I think it's very, very cool, very exciting. Well, I've learned so much in this half hour, and I'm sure that my listeners have too. Where can folks go to learn more about Cellnex? As you mentioned, Cellnex is a fairly new company in the space, although with very deep roots in the communications industry. And where can they go engage with you and your team? Well, come and see us at Mobile World Congress if you're around. We'll be in Hall 4, and that's 4C50. I'm on LinkedIn. My name is Katherine Galt.

Tell me in your message that you heard me here, and I will link in with you, and I'll answer any questions that you might have. And then finally, sellnext.com is where we're located, so find us there. Allison, thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show. It was so much fun. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website,

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