“The Syniverse and Affirmed solution supports LTE for businesses’ secure network connections, ‘global SIM resources’ for internet access, and IoT for connected devices and smart cities. The solution allows enterprises to create their own network, similar to a mobile operator, to improve agility while reducing network complexities and costs.”
These two sentences, culled from this press release from Syniverse launching a cloud-based private network solution for IoT applications, deserve attention. Using its own connectivity and interconnect capabilities to provide security, signalling and domain inter-working, in addition to virtualised core network features from Affirmed Networks, Syniverse is proposing a cloud-based, wireless IoT network solution for enterprises.
Look at the slide below (click for bigger). What you can see here is a business customer being able to build IoT access networks for themselves with full network inter-connectivity to other domains via the cloud-based vEPC. On the left we see a variety of access networks, including private LTE and WiFi. Moving right we see Syniverse can provide that cloud-based core from Affirmed Networks, connectivity via its own private, secure network (it calls this non-public internet network Secure Global Access), as well as interconnect to MNO domains.
For now, Syniverse told us the access technique it is adopting is based on non-3GPP technologies: “We will begin with trusted, non-3GPP, Wi-Fi networks using a Trusted Wireless Access Gateway (TWAG) and the EPC.”
In addition, the company already has a partnership with Ruckus Wireless to explore CBRS-based private LTE networks. Announcing this in February, it said it was demonstrating a solution using Ruckus CBRS access points, spectrum access control from Federated and a Syniverse core. (We know now that the core is being provided by Affirmed Networks.)
Nor are these companies alone. Athonet, a company that provides vEPC and vCore software and has long focussed on the private network market, recently announced a tie-up with Ruckus and AWS to exploit CBRS to provide cloud-based private networks for IoT.
Mobile network operators, the Syniverse release says, can also benefit from this sort of cloud solution. Mobile IoT devices will not always remain within their private access network bubble. With the Syniverse core offering SIM management and security wrap-around, operators can offer inbound and outbound roaming to IoT devices in a secure fashion, and indeed to the data travelling to and from those devices. But those operators banking on NB-IoT and 5G IoT plus core networks to hook up enterprise IoT business should also give this sort of solution a long hard look over. It undoubtedly presents competition as well as opportunity.