00:47
This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

00:58
In this podcast, we'll explore tools, technologies, and talented people. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox, and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

01:12
Welcome to the art of network engineering. I am AJ Murray at no blinky blinky and tonight I am joined by Tim He is at Timbertino. Good evening, Tim. How are you sir AJ? I got to use my snowblower today It's quite the opposite here where I am man, I gotta tell you so so you usually get it worse than I do No, no kidding, but it has been it was in the 50s today, man I went for a hike in a like place not too far from me here

01:41
And I was just wearing a hoodie. It was great. Yeah, yeah, we had the kids at the park on Monday. It was like almost 60 degrees. And today we got probably five, six inches of snow today. Yeah, it was nuts. Oh my goodness. Wow, that's crazy. The weather is still crazy stuff these days. It's the weird month for everything, including weather. Yeah. And that voice you hear is Lexi at Track and Pacer. Lexi, it's so good to see you. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever. I know you went on a lovely little trip. Yeah.

02:10
I disappeared for a little while. I'm so sorry. Um, yeah, I went to go. What a life she must lead. I'm so jealous. Um, yeah, I went to go see some big waterfalls in Brazil. So that was really awesome. Yeah. That is so cool. Yeah. I came back to like 200 emails at work in my inbox.

02:30
But it's fine because everything is, I've finally caught up after two weeks. I'm good. I was going to, I was going to ask if you went through it and tried to catch up because I've heard the flip side of that too, where people will basically just tell coworkers that, Hey, I'm going to be gone for X amount of time. And if you send me anything, I'm not going to read it. So you'll just need to resend it when I get back.

02:54
I wish I could, but I get a lot of notifications from not just straight up emails, but I'll get ticket notifications. Sure. There's just stuff. I had to go through it. I've been at Blue for a year now, so I had my HR training that they were telling me I need to do, or the mandatory security stuff and all that good stuff. So I had to go back and take a look at that. Anyway, I'm all caught up. I'm good. Excellent. I'm feeling good today.

03:22
Yeah. How about you AJ? How are you doing? Well, you know, the crazy weather stuff, it's, it's, it's welcome, but it's just like, wow, this is, this is strange. Because normally this time of year for us, like in February, the high is a negative number, like the entire month, right? That's the norm here in Vermont. But man, This is like fall spring for you right now. Oh, totally. It absolutely feels like spring. Yeah. I, it's, it's going to come back and bite us because they always say there's two springs in Vermont. There's like full spring and then there's actual spring. Yeah. I feel you.

03:52
Well, we have a very special episode today. This is a bonus episode, if you will. This episode is sponsored by Solona. Solona is considered a pioneer in the emerging market for private 4G and 5G systems, and they are credited with innovating the industry's first 5G LAN system. Tonight, our guest this evening is Andrew Von Nagy, Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Solona. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks everyone for having me here.

04:22
cold weather this week. I broke out my snow blower today as well, twice. Wow. Got a good six, eight inches off of my driveway inside. Oh my gosh. Nice. Can I ask guys, what is a snow blower? What does it do? Does it just get rid of the snow? Or like, what does it do? I'm from Texas, so I don't know what's going on. Lucky. Well, I'm trying to think of that. So you were in Texas, and then, yeah, I guess you just flew over the snow. Yeah.

04:51
Well, we have snow here. I'm in the Seattle area now, right? And we have snow here, but like not that often, like not often enough that anyone owns a snow blower. We have like two snow plows in the entire city. So like, we don't know what we're doing. So I still don't know what to do in the snow. So to answer your question, it has a bit of an impeller on the front and it takes the snow in and then it shoots it out like a shoot and you control.

05:16
It's like a gooseneck kind of thing, right? Oh, it's displacing the snow. Yeah, so you can shoot the snow onto your lawn or whatever. Actually, that sounds kind of fun. I'm particularly thrilled because last fall we had our driveway paved. So this spring, I will no longer have to dig stones out of my grass before I mow the lawn. Because I used to have a stone driveway. I think snowblowers are only a second to chainsaws in the amount of fun you can have. Yeah, I love mine.

05:44
Well, Andrew, today is Mobile World Congress Day, at least if you're listening to the podcast on the day that we release it, right? And I understand that Solona has some very exciting announcements. Yeah, we're announcing our release of our 5G LAN solution, our products around private 5G, for both indoor and outdoor use cases for enterprise customers. So it's a pretty exciting time for launch of the new product for us, yeah.

06:08
So I mean, right off the bat, when you say something like 5G, I automatically think cellular network, right? Like I've got my smartphone. What's the, I don't know, there's so many questions, right? Like what's the benefit of a private 5G network? Why not just use what's out there, right? And then I'm a network engineer. How much wireless knowledge do I need to have to operate one of your 5G networks? Yeah, well, there's kind of a lot wrapped up into that question because the history of cellular is quite different than the history of.

06:37
local area networks or wide area networks that enterprises typically deploy. So we're not necessarily talking about cellular, but it's a little bit more than Wi-Fi though. Well, so you've got to kind of decouple the technology from the go-to-market business model, right? So cellular has historically been a go-to-market model with carriers and mobile network operators providing wide area macro network coverage.

07:02
What Solona has done and some of the regulatory bodies around the world have allowed now is shared spectrum, which is essentially the highway on which wireless runs to be used for private cellular or private 5G solutions now. So enterprises for the first time can really adopt and deploy and own their own cellular network independent of any cellular carrier or traditional mobile network operator, I should say.

07:30
Like, you know, you're typical in the States, you have Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, which merged recently. You have those carriers that you, from a consumer standpoint, you get subscriptions from, and you just go around and you're agnostic, you don't know anything about their network. Now an enterprise can really buy and deploy their own cellular network, whether 4G or 5G, and take advantage of the benefits of the underlying technology, the wireless technology, for their own internal use cases and business processes.

08:00
So does a customer have to go out and get that space on their own? Or they can they partner with somebody like Solona to purchase Solona solution and then Solona helps them figure out what, what space they need to get and integrate into their enterprise. Yeah. So in the U S it's fairly straightforward. There's a chunk of shared spectrum that the FCC opened a couple of years ago called the citizens broadband radio service or CBRS for short.

08:26
CBRS is just a designator or an acronym for the slice of spectrum that they've designated. And so in the US, Solona takes care of everything related to that spectrum for the customer. They don't have to buy or acquire any spectrum themselves. It's all shared spectrum. And we have to register it when they start using it with a centralized database for coordination amongst anybody who wants to use it.

08:52
so they don't step on each other from an interference standpoint too much. But really, it's open for anybody. It gets a little bit different globally. Like with all spectrum regulations, even with other wireless technologies, it can be a little hit or miss depending on which country you go into, to which frequencies are technically available. So we have that situation as well. So in the most of Europe, they're opening up a little bit different band than the US. They have a little bit different process for getting access to it.

09:20
Whereas in the US, you just start using it and register with a centralized database when you do. In Europe, some of them are manual process to fill out some paperwork. And usually it might be a short turnaround of a couple of weeks before you can get access to use it. So it varies between country to country and regulatory domain. So you said it's shared, but it's tracked. So does that mean that I could use as a customer, I could use a specific spectrum that is the same as another customer that's in a...

09:49
different geographic area of the country and that's fine because we're not close to each other? Yeah, you could even use the same spectrum in the same location or areas. The difference being there's a couple of complications or wrinkles that come in with that, but you're not prohibited from using it in the same space. Just like with Wi-Fi you can use the same frequencies in the same space as other people, but you have to just be careful of degradation of performance. Same thing goes. Cellular has a few...

10:16
technical technology features that can help mitigate interference. If they are conforming to the same parameters, they're in alignment, and then it's very easy for them to coexist. The only exceptions to that is that there's incumbents in the band in the US, which is primarily the Department of Defense, and they really only use it on naval aircraft carriers in very small chunks in the band.

10:43
So really that's only a concern typically along the coastlines in the U.S. Virginia Beach, San Diego, Seattle, some of the heaviest use areas. So for instance, like when war erupted over in Europe, there was all sorts of military exercise going up and down the west coast of the U.S. So there's all sorts of incumbent activity that we had to navigate during the initial part of that time period. But overall, it's not too bad. It's not very widespread.

11:12
Can you talk a little bit about use cases? I'm sure a lot of potential customers would have already using Wi-Fi on their networks. It sounds like the use cases for Wi-Fi versus this Solona solution might overlap quite a bit. Could you talk a little bit to why a customer would want to implement Solona solution maybe alongside or instead of Wi-Fi at this point?

11:40
Yeah, absolutely. My background is actually in Wi-Fi. I transitioned over to cellular about three and a half, four years ago now. So on the Wi-Fi side, so they use a lot of the same underlying physical layer properties. So they both use OFDM for modulation and they use very similar physics properties underneath them.

12:06
But once you start getting up into, not even even the layer two Mac layer, once you're even on the HiFi layer, there's some differences in how the protocols work that make them inherently different and suited to different use cases. So probably the easiest to understand of those is that Wi-Fi is contention-based. So there's no coordination among any stations or the APs. So really what they're doing is they're doing a carrier sense, is anybody else talking over the air? If it's idle, I feel I can go ahead and grab the medium and start transmitting myself.

12:36
Very similar to, you know, it derived out of the same IEEE organization that, you know, ethernet did. So if you're familiar with 802.3 ethernet and how carrier sense multiple access works, very similar. Only instead of collision detection after the fact on ethernet, we're doing collision avoidance in the wifi world. But the same thing, you're listening for preambles, is anything there? No, I can go ahead and transmit. If there is, I gotta wait. That works well when the network is relatively idle.

13:02
Unfortunately though, it breaks down quite rapidly once the network is under various levels of load depending on your application requirements. So it becomes very challenging to deploy mission-critical applications that have very strict latency or bandwidth requirements on Wi-Fi, because you really can't guarantee any level of service. It's all statistical prioritization. Even with a QoS and Wi-Fi, you're giving a statistical advantage to some applications, but you can never guarantee it.

13:31
And so we have all these workarounds and rules of thumb and design practices in Wi-Fi like, hey, if you're using voice, make sure that channel utilization always stays under 50%. Why am I throwing away half of my capacity? Because I need to keep that level of performance that voice applications require. Whereas on the cellular side with 4G and 5G, inherently it's not a distributed contention medium. Cellular uses it as a centrally coordinated medium, meaning the access points,

14:00
strictly control during every time slot what's going upload and download traffic to and from clients. And so if clients want access to transmit, they have to check in with the AP and say, hey, I have some data to transmit. Give me some time. Then the AP will schedule that time in an upcoming time slot or multiple time slots, what they call physical resource blocks in the cellular world. And then we grant access to those time slots to specific clients. So whether it's uplink or downlink, the infrastructure controls all of the traffic going over the network.

14:29
So when it's controlled from the infrastructure, and you see where I'm going with this QoS, once I control it, now I can control which applications have priority, which clients and applications, the combination of those, get which access and how often. And I can very easily map that to business processes and say, this is my highest priority level of traffic. It goes first if it needs time, and then on down the list. And I can assure very high.

14:57
deterministic performance on the wireless network with a cellular network. As far as Andrew, as far as connectivity, is Solona's 5G LAN solution, is it mainly targeted for indoor and outdoor just within close range or can we connect close buildings in like a mesh or a point to point networks with your 5G LAN solution? The range is quite a bit larger than Wi-Fi.

15:25
So it comes into a combination of factors. Some of it is protocol driven. Just how cellular uses and formats the frames actually allow it to get larger, longer range. So even though there's an underlying physics level that's the same, how you use that still dictates potentially your range. And also the regulations around the spectrum you're using and the transmit power. So like the carriers can use in their license frequencies that they go to auction for, they can use kilowatts of power.

15:55
And that's why you can get a cell tower that's several miles away and you still can get a good signal on your phone. In the shared space and the shared spectrum in the US, we don't have quite as high a power. It's actually an order of magnitude less than the mobile network operators for their macro networks, but it's still more than Wi-Fi. So we can typically transmit at about 50 watts of power in the US with a private 4G or 5G network.

16:24
one watt or less and typically implemented with 100 milliwatts or less. So there's an order of magnitude greater power we can transmit at and there's some underlying protocol differences but for the use case you can do like fixed wireless so like a point to point link between buildings if you wanted. There's really no concept of mesh in 4G that is incoming in a 5G standard and I believe it's like a release. I want to say release 17 but don't quote me on that.

16:54
It's not to market yet, it's still just in standards, hasn't really been implemented yet. So, most of the time when you're thinking about private 4G or 5G, you're thinking of infrastructure to client communication. But those clients can be all sorts of form factors. It can be smartphones, it can be mobile routers, like Cradlepoint or Sierra Wireless with a whole bunch of devices hanging off of that itself that are not cellular. And it could be other things like fixed wireless installations, USB dongles.

17:21
tablets and laptops that have it natively. But the biggest use case we're seeing right now, early on in the market, is what we call enterprise and semi-industrial. So warehouses, manufacturing, logistics and shipping yards, things where they have either automation or complex business processes that they want to run very efficiently on wireless. We're not to the stage where we're doing carpeted offices for just bulk productivity of employees or anything like that yet.

17:48
Can we talk about infrastructure connectivity? So this is a 5G LAN solution. Can I see this as really just an extension of my production network, local area network? Am I just connecting these 5G access points to my production network? How does that connectivity work? Yeah, that's exactly the way we want you to think about the Solona 5G LAN solution, which is quite different from a lot of other legacy or traditional.

18:15
cellular carriers and operators is traditionally for other private solutions that have been out there using license spectrum or some of these MNOs coming into the new private shared spectrum in the US. They'll do a complete parallel network that they own and control and then just sell you the service. But that's very expensive because they have to pull in all new fiber, all their own switching, all their own backhaul. With the Solona 5G LAN solution, it literally, we try to make it as simple and as easy for

18:45
to buy it and operate it just like they do any other enterprise networking equipment. So our access points are 4G or 5G. They work indoors or outdoors depending on the model. And you just plug them into your Ethernet network. And then they tunnel that traffic back to the packet core, which is a Solona software solution that you can deploy anywhere in your network that you want, depending on your architecture and your application traffic flows and what their demands are. And so that can be locally at the site. It could be at your own data center. It could be in the public cloud.

19:15
Or it could even be in one of the cloud solutions private offerings for local solutions like Amazon has their Snow class series of servers that they can deploy on site, but still managed through the EC2 portal. Same with Microsoft Azure. They have Azure Stack Edge, which essentially they're selling you a server and it's managed through their cloud management platform still. But yeah, so really it looks just like a wifi AP. You plug it into your ethernet. The indoor ones are even powered over ethernet.

19:44
as well. And then it just uses your existing layer two, layer three enterprise network to, uh, to forward traffic around based on your policies. So in ethernet and wifi networks, we, we leverage for security, we leverage solutions like 802.1 X and, and radius. Am I getting to use those same solutions that I already have in my regular ethernet and wifi production network as is in this, um, Solona private five G LAN as well? Well, uh, it

20:13
You can integrate with them, but it's a little bit different. So in Wi-Fi, if you didn't want an open or a pre-shared key low security network, you were doing 802.1x EAP authentication with early implementations were still PEEP, password-based, username password-based, or you could do EAP TLS with like certificates. In the cellular space, the architecture and how the protocols are defined, the most common method for authenticating clients is with still with a SIM card.

20:42
That could be either a physical card or we support electronic SIMs, which can be deployed through various means like a QR code or an MDM solution to the devices. But that SIM card essentially has a profile on it that allows it to authenticate to your private cellular network. And then what Salon is doing is we are integrating with AAA solutions like RADIUS and TACACS for authorization of those users. So you can map or assign a SIM credential.

21:11
just like you would assign a certificate to a user. And then you can base policy for that SIM or that user based on your existing policy infrastructure. That's still kind of in development. It's not fully available today, but it's something that is definitely coming. How much do your customers need to know already about 5G in order to...

21:36
to implement this in their production networks? Well, we try to make it as adoptable as possible for the enterprise, but having transitioned from Wi-Fi into the cellular space myself, I can tell you the standards are even more arcane and even more complicated than anything that I could wish for. Oh, hooray, that's great to hear. But leveraging the fact that we're an end-to-end solution, you don't necessarily need to know all the protocol level stuff, as long as you know how to.

22:04
piece our solution together, which is fully integrated from Mendes. So you use our AP, you use our packet core, we have our cloud orchestration and management. As long as you know how to bring them up, how to activate users, and then how to, you know, the gap right now is probably in the troubleshooting phase where you're looking at logs still, just like the early days of ethernet or wifi, and you're trying to figure out what this log means. Getting better, we're working on like AI assistance and things like that to translate, you know, cellular.

22:32
alerts and logs into something that's more human readable of, hey, this client has this problem for this reason, instead of just reading some arcane log. So I would say from an adoption perspective, we definitely make it easier than a lot of the other solutions where you have to piecemeal together your own AP and packet core, stitch them together, get your own authentication, a SIM authentication database. So the carriers, they use the best of breed of everything and they just stitch it all together.

22:59
But that takes a lot of development work and engineers who really know in depth all of these cellular protocols on the backend. We've done all that hard work. So really to adopt a Solona network, you just need to know our product documentation. And then we're getting better and better every day with data visibility and troubleshooting and things like that, which should help ease that, I'd say ongoing operations. So similar to the skills you need to be a network engineer in general, you can definitely use those to.

23:27
also implement this. Cool. I like to tell people I was a network engineer for 20 years. If I can adopt cellular, you can too. Because it is intimidating. I mean, I first jumped into this industry, and I was like, oh man, there's no material to go read. It's all locked. It's all proprietary inside of a lot of MNOs. It's like, what book do I buy? Well, there's not much out there. So I've had to stitch things together. But there are some good resources that you can leverage, and it's definitely possible.

23:56
You know, I gotta say this sounds a whole lot easier than I was picturing in my head. Like I thought we were putting towers up on campuses or structures on top of buildings and building out like private, you know, cellular type networks. But this sounds a lot familiar to stuff that I've already kind of dealt with as a network engineer, you know, doing infrastructure at various companies. So it's not like a stretch to deploy this and you get a whole bunch of added benefits that you're not gonna get from the wireless infrastructure you already have.

24:23
Yeah, a lot of our use cases are indoors with indoor mounted APs, just like you would a Wi-Fi AP on PoE. The outdoor ones, yeah, you can mount on the side of a building. Unless you're really going for very large range or very large or long point-to-point links, you don't really need to get, I mean, the higher you get, the farther you can go as the rule of thumb. So if you wanted to build your own macro network and put up a tower, we've done that with a couple of partners. So just depends on what your business case is for what customer you're going after.

24:53
What are some of the, I guess, more popular use cases for Solana? Right now, it's all in the semi-industrial. So warehouse automation is huge. Shipping and logistics yards for automation of truck hostilers that are, you know, at shipping ports are moving around those large metal containers. Very long outdoor point-to-point links. So I believe we've actually worked with Blue on some large outdoor coverage. I was just...

25:19
I was just thinking like industrial and those kinds of circumstances sound very similar to like a launch pad or, you know, like our more industrial parts of the campus. So interesting. Yeah. And then another whole area that we're opening up within the new technology initiatives within Salonas, we've been working with the MNOs actually on what we call neutral host. So carriers and MNOs have a problem with 5G.

25:47
They had it with 4G to some extent, but with 5G, they're typically leveraging a little bit higher spectrum bands, higher in the frequency range, which means they don't penetrate indoors as well. So they're having a large indoor coverage problem with a lot of their 5G rollouts. So one of the big aspects is, well, what if a customer puts in a private network indoors and then just allows from a neutral host perspective to interconnect to the MNO cellular network?

26:13
and those subscribers can walk into the building, seamlessly transition from the macro towers from the carrier onto your private network, and they don't have to do anything. It still looks to them like they're on their own, the network that they subscribe to, but they're just getting service through the public network that we route on the backend back to the carrier. So that's a whole burgeoning area that's opening up. We also see a lot of retail use cases where they're looking to extend coverage outdoors for drive up and pickup delivery of, you know.

26:43
consumers coming to store to pick stuff up or things of that nature. Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of the semi industrial and retail use cases. Yeah, the indoor extension of the mobile network operators. That sounds really compelling to me because I live in a place with a lot of mountains. And so cellular service isn't fantastic. In fact, a friend of mine runs a manufacturing facility. He does IT for a manufacturing facility where he's working with a company to do exactly what you just described.

27:11
the mobile network into the manufacturing facility. And it's been a huge project. Yeah, that's really got to help with roaming, like you said, to be able to just extend that network onto your own APs. So Andrew, I know you're the technical person, so I don't want to get too marketing on you. But what are, or sorry, who are the target customers of your solution? Is it?

27:36
Really any size of enterprises? Is it mainly larger enterprises? I know you're doing a lot of work in manufacturing and shipping, but what else is out there? Yeah, so think of Solona as a traditional network manufacturer. We manufacture the hardware for the APs, and we develop our own software for the packet core and the software that goes on the APs, and all the cloud orchestration and management. We're fully API driven, so we have kind of a DevOps mentality.

28:03
an API first mentality. So we're targeting any enterprise that wants to deploy private cellular or private 5G for their use case. And we also have a very similar go-to model from a lot of network manufacturers in the enterprise space today where we sign up value-added resellers. They can add value on top of just our solution by selling services. So if you're not familiar or comfortable trying to deploy it yourself, you can sign them up and they can, you know.

28:31
deploy it for you, install it for you, potentially even manage it for you as a managed service. So it's not only large enterprise customers, it's mid-market and small business as well. Typically our go-to model is more direct for the larger enterprises as normal network manufacturers are, but we are strictly channel first. So we'll have a channel partner involved for the mid-market and the small.

28:57
to medium business. Typically we're going through a managed service provider that wants to offer those as a turnkey solution to those SMBs. So we're not going into every small business. We're letting our partners handle those and facilitating that on the back end and helping them through that process. Well, Andrew, if somebody listening today wanted to learn more about Solona, where can they go? Yeah, definitely just hit us up on our website. It's solona.io. We have a lot of documentation there. We're kind of a knowledge first company.

29:26
sharing all the information that we learn as we go as an organization. So you can find a lot of webinars, resources, YouTube videos on there. We have all our product documentation on docs.salona.io. And we have a frequency community that we've spun up that you can join as well if you want to interact in forums and chat with us on a regular basis. Awesome. Andrew, is there anything about Salona that we should have asked you about that we didn't in this conversation?

29:55
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're out there. We're trying to make a name for ourselves. So it's definitely a new market, a lot of education going on in this market. If you're looking to learn about cellular, we do have some training and certification courses we come out with. So we partnered with CWNP, Certified Wireless Network Professionals. They do a lot of the Wi-Fi training that is vendor agnostic in the Wi-Fi industry.

30:19
We thought, what better group, because we're catering to a lot of the existing network administrators. So I was actually part of a team that went and helped them create content. But by no means is it vendor-specific content. It's very vendor-agnostic, trying to learn the technology. So there's a certification out there. If you go to CWNP's website, it's not under... You have to look under a weird place. It's not under certifications. It's under products. I think you'll find the C5S course, Certified 5G Specialist.

30:47
And then we also, for our channel partners, we have some sales and sales engineering related training as we onboard partners as well. So you can get a little bit more of the product, Solona product focused training of how to sell it, how to deploy it and operate it from a technical perspective. But really none of that training content for partners differs very much from what's on our public website on the docs.solona.io. So you go to that website, you can see everything about what products we offer, common use cases,

31:17
Some step-by-step guides on how to deploy it We even have guides on how to get different devices connected to our network Whether that be Apple devices Android devices cradle points you name it So when I said we were out there sharing your knowledge that we're definitely trying to share everything we learn as we go Yeah, awesome. Well Andrew. This has been a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us tonight We're you're going to put links in the show notes So you can go right to the description of this YouTube video or the show notes for this episode of the podcast

31:45
And if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Salona.io. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you so much to Salona for their support of what we do here at the Art of Network Engineering. And we'll see you next time on another episode. Thank you. Hey everyone, this is AJ. If you like what you heard today, then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. Smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes. Also follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We are at Art of NetEng.

32:14
That's Art of N-E-T-E-N-G. You can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.com, where we post all of our show notes. You can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests, and also a lot more news and info from the networking world. Thanks for listening.