The company will use the unlicensed General Authorized Access (GAA) portion of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) 3.5 GHz band to provide enterprises with their own private network with a focus on security.
Betacom is no stranger to the wireless industry. With 30 years of industry experience, Betacom has been involved with the design and deployment of some of the largest networks in the United States. Now, the company has raised $15 million in funds to launch a private 5G network using GAA CBRS. Investors include Braxton Carter, the former T-Mobile CFO, and will launch Betacom’s 5G-as-a-Service aiming to provide the industry’s first fully managed private wireless service.
“Private 5G networks have incredible potential to revolutionize the way that a number of industries, including transportation, manufacturing, and logistics, conduct their business and accelerate their progress,” Carter said in a prepared statement. “But design, deployment, and management of these complex networks can be strong barriers to realizing the benefits. Betacom is exactly the right company to eliminate those barriers for enterprises of all sizes, and I am extremely enthusiastic to be able to partner with and support them as they bring this much-needed new offering to market.”
Since 1991, Betacom has made a name for itself working with major names including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon providing over 800 design and deployment solutions. After securing funds over the last few years in the San Francisco and Seattle markets, Betacom moved its headquarters from Tampa, Florida to Bellevue, Washington building a new team to increase its revenue from $35 million to around $100 million annually.
Keeping data secure continues to be an obstacle for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. The world we live in continues to become more and more connected and sensitive data is in need of protection. This is where Betacom is hoping to provide solutions as it is marketing its private 5G-as-a-service offering towards enterprises that are looking to retain ownership over their data and improve security. Betacom leader Johan Bjorkland is aiming to provide these enterprises with a security and service operating center aka a modem and cloud-based network operations center (NOC) hosted on Microsoft Azure.
“We’re focusing our solution a lot around security, which is what our customers express interest in. We’re offering them an enterprise-grade service level agreement, where they own the network and we operate the network. They focus on their core business. Our goal is for them to have their own private wireless network without having to add one single staff to their headcount,” said Bjorkland.
Betacom’s competitive advantage comes from the fact that its solution can fit within an enterprise’s firewall. The company is focusing on 3GPP-based technology over WiFi as it has more advantages including mobility. The next step is building its team of vendors with a target to find American-based vendors which operate with Open RAN.
Source: Fierce Wireless