Dr.

Enterprise or: How I learned to stop

worrying and love cellular

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Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular
A conversation between Art King, In-Building Networks Group, Corning, and Monica Paolini, Principal,
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The enterprise is becoming unwired. While the
wireline infrastructure is still crucial for
transport, wireless has become the default for
access. The pervasive connectivity to people
and IoT devices that the enterprise needs – and
that we all expect – is unthinkable without
capillary coverage and reliable capacity.
Wireline phones have become a relic, and even
Ethernet is now rarely used to connect laptops.
How is the enterprise transitioning to move
voice services, data connectivity and, more
generally, its operations to the wireless
infrastructure? How is the technology
changing the way the enterprise operates and
its internal culture? Art King at Corning
discussed these topics with me in a Sparring
Partners webinar, which is transcribed below.
Monica Paolini: After many years of PowerPoint
presentations on the wireless enterprise, things in
the enterprise have started to move forward. The
enterprise is becoming more actively involved,
and vendors are listening more closely to the
enterprise’s needs.
Wireless is nothing new to the enterprise. What is
different is how deeply wireless is penetrating into
the enterprise. It is not just about using a mobile
phone instead of a wireline phone.
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Art: Wireless is influential because it’s generally
engineered so that people like the user
experience. You see this in enterprises where
people are choosing to use their mobile device
over any offered technology that enterprise IT has
brought to them.
Years ago, when the iPhone 1 came out, we
looked at each other and understood how
revolutionary it was.
More importantly, we started asking the question
of what happens in the enterprise when you get
to 100% penetration of these devices? What
would change? We started thinking about what
the telecom landscape for internal employee
services would look like when you consider what
you’re offering to the employees today, how they
use it.
Over time, we’ve watched as people gradually
have abandoned many of the technologies that IT
provisions to their desk today and have switched
to mobile.
I see it around me all the time. I see conference
rooms where there’s a speakerphone but the
person, for sheer convenience, has tossed their
phone in the middle of the table and put it on
speaker to use as a conference phone. And, it’s
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular
got very adequate audio quality compared to the
speakerphone.
Monica: I was one of the people who, when the
iPhone came out, thought, “Oh, what is this thing?
It doesn’t even have a keyboard. How do you use
it? It’s not going to go anywhere.” I was wrong.
And we learned to use smartphones in a variety of
ways that were not planned or expected at the
beginning. They have become a flexible tool to
get all sorts of things done, eliminating much of
the complexity of old-school dedicated, wireline
devices. Smartphones were disruptive not
because they were fancy, but because they were
easy to use.
Art: Let me tell you a story. When I was in the
enterprise, I was working with an app that had
been released internally. It was for managers to
release POs that their employees had generated.
Because it was a mobile app, it was engineered to
do one thing and do it well.
When we started looking at metrics and how
people were using it, we discovered that
throughout the corporate buildings, people were
not using the five-stage, generic PC interface to
go find the PO release button and do it on their
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laptop or their desktop. Instead, they were sitting
there at their desk on their mobile device and
approving their POs because it was one click. It
was easy. It was obvious how to use it. That whole
usability philosophy has driven a migration away
from a lot of the enterprise wireline tech.
Monica: How do you see the disruption that is
coming from wireless right now? How are
employee behaviors like the ones you just
described changing the way the enterprise as a
whole operates?
Art: This is what I was planning when I was on the
buy side as an enterprise person. We were
changing how we were going to build and wire
office buildings. We were going to cut millions of
dollars of capital expenses out of greenfield
construction by eliminating a huge amount of
cable plant to the desk.
Then we started backing up and looking at the IT
services that people were not consuming because
they used their mobiles for things like voice. For
many people, the desk phone in their office
became a place for all the vendors to call and
leave voicemails. You’d check voicemails once a
week and potentially not ever use your desk
phone for anything else.
The observation of the change in behavior made
us understand what people were quietly
abandoning within the enterprise. I’m sure we’ve
all sat in meetings together and texted each other
and didn’t use a corporate IM tool. Everyone’s got
a mobile in their pocket. You text each other back
and forth when you’re in a presentation.
In many cases, the utility of the tool and the fact
that it’s always in your pocket has a
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transformative effect. For the IT team,
things have to scale. Operators need
networks that can scale up to 130,
140 million people. A large enterprise
at 50,000 or 60,000 people is like one
neighborhood in Los Angeles,
compared to the scale of the
operators’ networks.
Monica: As we deploy private
networks, we need to be able to
authenticate devices in a way that
does not depend on an operator.
Employees are not going to have a
different phone for when they are at
work, just to connect to the enterprise network. It looks like eSIMs are going to take off for IoT,
but even in the enterprise space and in closed
I think multi-SIM devices are going to be crucial geographic areas, where you’re going to provide
in pushing things forward. Do you agree? Do you devices that are going to stay there, private LTE
see other forms of authentication, especially for infrastructure fits.
IoT devices?
You can leverage your corporate dial plan for
Art: We are seeing a lot of interest in private LTE your PBX infrastructure, distribute phone numbers
because you can bring up LTE and still have a out to the mobile devices, and use the native
connection to the operators. But this requires a dialer to run against the dial plan of your own
dual-SIM phone. I’ve seen this in use with my own corporation.
two eyes, I know it’s real. One SIM opens the door
onto the enterprise LTE network, and the other As long as you don’t expect to take those mobiles
SIM card uses voice over Wi-Fi interconnect off that private network and operate anywhere
procedures to connect out to the operator’s core else, it’s certainly feasible to use your incumbent
network over the enterprise LTE. enterprise infrastructure, and essentially remove
the corporate handsets, and integrate into the
We’re already seeing that enterprises can light native voice capabilities of the mobile devices
LTE themselves without a lot of intervention, and themselves.
still connect to the operator’s home network.
Assuming that the network is installed correctly, Monica: Art, in the first [webinar] poll, managed
and is built correctly for handovers, when you’re service providers come at top among those
roaming on LTE internally, you’re in pretty good supporting the enterprise cellular needs. Is that
shape with the dual-SIM phone. what you were expecting?
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |3|
Art: I was expecting more in the way of mobile
operators. The managed service providers are a
great selection. I say that because Wi-Fi and
cellular are radically different. At the end of the
day, do you want to gear up to run mobile
infrastructure inside your enterprise or do you
want an MSP to handle operations and provide
service as a clean monthly transaction?
This is going to become important internally to
the enterprise as more things that are
mission-critical and close to the heartbeat of the
business, such as manufacturing, move to
wireless. IT’s going to have to eventually run the
network or tightly manage the MSP, because they
are responsible for SLAs and availability.
You can’t have a main part of your operation
down and no one to talk to as far as getting help
because you’re contracted to someone on the
outside world who is nonresponsive. I think
enterprise is going to run anything that’s
mission-critical.
Monica: As I was looking at the poll results, I
realized that the preference for managed service
providers does not necessarily mean that mobile
operators are not included. We’re going to see a
lot of situations where the physical buildout, the
day-to-day managing of the network, might be
done by a managed service provider but the
managed service provider works with the
operators.
There is a value to that, especially when you have
a multi-location business where many
applications and most of the traffic stay local, but
some traffic – and an important part of it – has to
go to the cloud. And to support employees
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working from home, traffic has to go through the
internet.
The operators will continue to play an important
role to manage this traffic. Their role may change
and evolve in this context. Some operators may
want to build enterprise infrastructure and run it.
Will they succeed? That’s debatable.
Art: Private LTE can be offered by the operators, it
can be offered by managed service providers, or it
can be built by the enterprises.
The operator community is always searching for
revenue. They have a great infrastructure to
manage SIMs, KPIs, SLAs, the whole nine yards, on
the back end. They have a lot of the raw material
necessary to offer private LTE. In what shape or
form that’s going to happen is yet to be
determined.
Monica: I completely agree with you: operators
have all they need to meet the needs of the
enterprise. The operators’ challenge, though, is
not about the expertise, but rather their ability to
be cost-effective, and to get the trust of the
enterprise. the enterprise the desired level of control over the
network? That’s going to be a major issue.
By trust, I don’t mean in terms of network
That’s why some enterprises may prefer to have a
security. When I talk to people in the enterprise,
non-operator third party run their networks, so
they want to have control over the network. They
they can have full ownership and control of their
want to have the network do exactly what they
network – or networks.
want it to do. They want to know where things
are.
Art: We got a very critical question from the
audience about SLA penalties. With managed
Operators love control, because they’re used to
service providers, the sales force and the people
having control over their networks. They want to
involved in network engineering will sign up to
know what the network is doing. There can be
SLAs and to penalties.
some tension there. Is the operator willing to give
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |4|
In some markets, operators may opt out of
opportunities because of the business risk of
jumping in, or the inability to commit to an SLA
that has teeth in it, that bites.
If you’re the internal decision maker supporting a
production line and it’s down, and somehow
you’ve got best-effort, consumer-grade support,
you are in pretty big trouble, because your
manufacturing has halted, because you made a
drastic contractual error when you committed.
Monica: This is going to be one of the disruptive
features of private LTE. It is not just about how we
build networks. It is about how we evaluate them,
how we assess reliability, what KPIs we use and
how we measure them.
The KPIs you have for a public network are going
to be somewhat different from a private LTE
network, although there’s clearly some overlap.
For the enterprise, you might have a different way
to define SLAs.
Art: Yes. Also, some private LTE networks, built by
the emergent providers that are already wireless
operators, have roaming agreements with the
major carriers in the US. They have the ability to
broadcast their own PLMN, and have enabled
devices to roam on and off the network.
A roaming infrastructure of this kind would also
be useful, especially for single-SIM phones. The
one caution that we should all put out there is
that the enterprise is going to pay the freight for
these things.
There’s no sense in the industry that the
operators are going to pay a roaming charge to
get onto the enterprise private network for
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convenience. It appears that the
enterprise is either going to pick it
up as a fixed cost – for instance, a
monthly charge for the managed
service infrastructure – to make
sure that the MSP gets a positive
ROI on the hardware investment,
and the opex to run the
infrastructure on behalf of the
enterprise.
Monica: Absolutely, and this
takes us to the question of who is
going to pay for it. I think
enterprises have to pay for it,
because that’s the only way they
can have the control they need.
Also, it’s cheaper for the
enterprise to build on-prem
networks than for an operator. In In the UK, for instance, Ofcom is moving ahead
many cases, it might be an extension of what they with localized spectrum allocations, which are
already have, typically their Wi-Fi network. very low in cost and can cover small areas – the
area that an enterprise may occupy. Ofcom has
And new spectrum-sharing regulatory frameworks another initiative to encourage mobile operators
will facilitate this by making spectrum available to to share their licensed spectrum with other
the enterprise. players, such as WISPs and communities but also
enterprises.
In Germany and the Netherlands there are bands
reserved for enterprise use, with allocations made I think – and hope – that we will see more
on a local, as-needed basis, rather than a nation- initiatives to share spectrum or use it more
wide award, but they protect spectrum access in a efficiently by allowing enterprises and venue
way that unlicensed bands do not. owners to roll out their private networks.
That makes spectrum much more affordable to This is going to benefit indoor coverage greatly.
the enterprise. It also increases the potential for Operators cannot afford to pay for IBW in most
spectral reuse, because you get protected access locations, but enterprises and venue owners can.
to the spectrum only for the real estate footprint And they will benefit from their private networks,
you have access to. I believe this is going to be a even if they will not get roaming revenues from
game changer.
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |5|
the operators. Operators will be happy to have
private networks improve in-building coverage,
but in most cases they will not pay to give their
subscribers access to them, as they expect they
will have access anyway – as they do with Wi-Fi
networks, which are basically private networks.
Also, you don’t need a huge amount of spectrum
for this kind of rollout. In the UK, the idea is that
you use it or lose it. If you apply for spectrum, you
get it, if there is any available. It’s a perpetual
license. If you use it, you can keep it forever. If
you don’t use the spectrum, Ofcom will give it to
somebody else.
Art: That’s certainly true. With these new
regulatory platforms, there’s the ability to light,
essentially, spectrum that hasn’t yet been lit by
the operator that licensed the spectrum from the
government. That hasn’t been mandated by
regulators yet in the US and is not something
that’s been seriously discussed so far.
In many places within office buildings, you’ll find
that there’s a distinct lack of signal. It can be a
problem. The operators have to address it
somehow with their approved technology, at this
moment in time, until something happens where
the spectrum can be shared or lit up by a third
party and interconnected into the carrier’s main
core network.
Monica: Is CBRS going to fix that in the US?
Art: The Wi-Fi model of infinite spectral reuse is
what CBRS is attempting to emulate. It’s nice,
because you keep a lot of low-power devices
indoors, and you conserve a lot of spectrum,
without networks colliding.
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When the outdoor CBRS starts
being deployed with 50-watt
radios, I don’t know what the
landscape looks like. The SAS
environment is supposed to
arbitrate and manage allocation of
spectrum, based on geographic
location. We will learn, over time,
whether this mix of low power and
higher power will work as
expected.
Monica: Do you think CBRS will
accelerate the move to private
LTE?
Art: A lot of the vendors that are
involved in private LTE are very
interested in listening to the buyer
and working backwards through a
group called the WInnForum, which develops Monica: Let’s talk about Wi-Fi. Private LTE or
most of the standards that CBRS is being private 5G networks are going to be also tied with
deployed under. the Wi-Fi network that the enterprise will continue
to have. Art, what’s your view on the coexistence
There’s quite a bit of activity out there on with Wi-Fi?
prioritizing and building the features that IT
people want to have available to them on the Art: They’re complementary. Anybody who thinks
enterprise side for CBRS. that Wi-Fi is going to be replaced, they’re not
rational. There are a huge number of laptops and
Vendors are bringing the customer needs and the provisioned devices connected to Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi
visions back in, because right now, in the early does its job every day.
stages of private LTE, there are some very big
corporates that want to adopt this, and see a The enterprise knows how to run Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi
need for it inside many chunks of their devices don’t have any kind of external costs
operations. associated with them, like a mobile device might
have on a public network. There are a lot of
Because of that, they have a lot of attention when advantages to Wi-Fi.
they bring a feature request from a global
company back to the WInnForum. You bring in private LTE because you have a
business need that requires the characteristics of
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |6|
LTE and, in the future, of 5G. You need the fair
access to schedule the MAC layer, you need the
voice services, you need the network reach over
long distances, you want to enable mobile devices
to run a lot of the native interfaces. For those
things, it’s practical to go ahead and run them on
the private LTE infrastructure, instead of Wi-Fi.
Monica: We have a question from the audience
about millimeter wave in the enterprise. I’m a big
believer in in-building millimeter wave, because
you have huge amounts of spectrum, and the bad
propagation is an advantage as it gives you
excellent spectrum reuse.
For things like robotic control, which is what the
question mentions, that’s a huge opportunity
there, although in most cases you do not need
the high bandwidth that you get with millimeter
wave.
We should not think of the enterprise networks as
limited to one access technology. For instance,
enterprises will not deploy only CBRS. They will
have at least Wi-Fi, and then they may use other
bands.
Then the question becomes, how do you
integrate them? It’s not about what is the winner
technology that is going to kill all the other ones,
but how are operators going to integrate them.
Art: 3GPP cellular technologies are pretty much
integrated together de facto, by the standards
specifications.
But how does it all plug into existing enterprise
infrastructure, and potentially, what enterprise
infrastructure can you throw overboard during
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the transition? It’s not so much anything other
than, how does it fit inside the ecosystem?
This circles back on the comment around things
that’ll be tough for the mobile operators to do,
because every enterprise has its own custom
configuration. There’s no such thing as a template
for enterprises. Everyone builds their networks a
different way. They have all sorts of different
technologies, different authentication methods.
It’s a very high-touch universe. For operators it is
a tough challenge to fit into something where
every customer is a one-off from their
perspective. It requires special groups of people
who can bridge the gap between the world of the
scalable consumer template and the custom
configuration that every enterprise actually has.
Monica: I was recently doing some research on
CBRS for a report, in which you participated. In
the first CBRS deployments, most initial
applications are simple ones.
We all are familiar with the autonomous driving,
AR, VR, all the fancy use cases that work very well
on slides and require mass adoption of 5G. But,
today, people mostly care about basic services
and applications – voice, payments, parking,
building monitoring and management, security
cameras.
We should clearly look at the more advanced
applications, but also keep in mind that, at the
very beginning, the focus is going to be on the
basic, bread-and-butter applications, which have
the advantage of proving the usefulness, value
and reliability of private networks. And this is
good thing.
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular
We have a question about voice. Voice is old
school, but we still need it. This is going to be a
good ground to build the foundation, in terms of
applications, for what we’re going to see next.
Art, you talk to the enterprises every day. What do
you hear from them?
Art: We’re hearing that the one problem a lot of
people are still trying to solve, paradoxically, is a
cost-effective way to get mobile broadband to all
the employees who are howling for service
indoors.
We’re not shooting rockets to the moon here.
There are quite a few people who still have the
unmet need of basic service. Then there are
visionary people who are looking at “How do I
throw a lot of my IT infrastructure overboard and
adopt mobile to successfully do that?”
We see conversations going on around how does
the operator become an authentication broker
back to, say, the enterprise Active Directory
infrastructure, so that a lot of the provisioning
and operations are automated and don’t have a
provisioning burden associated with them.
There’s work going on around orchestration of
automation, so that you can have a connection to
your chosen carrier or carriers. From there,
employees joining the organization and
connecting their mobile is a trivial exercise.
They’re self-provisioning at a portal that wouldn’t
require IT to do any work. Any kind of automation
that takes the workload off of the IT organization
is valuable.
Monica: Also, things like slicing will allow
different services to co-exist. Depending on what
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the enterprise needs to do and what are the
needs, they can do it.
We have a question from the audience on Voice
over Wi-Fi. Art, do you want to comment on the
voice aspects? I know you’ve been doing a lot of
work in that part.
Art: Initially, Voice over Wi-Fi worked at home but
not at work. A couple of things were happening.
Number one, the enterprise’s choice of
authentication might’ve had problems with a
mobile device. As people went mobile, they would
end up dropping calls, because when you left one
AP, the call didn’t hand over fast enough, so you
ended up dropping the call.
We also saw that some mobiles were using IPsec
NAT-T tunnels to connect to the core network.
Most security organizations don’t let you
originate a NAT-T tunnel from inside an
enterprise, because it can be used for exfiltration
of stolen data, and that kind of thing. It becomes
a security risk. I haven’t looked at it in a year, so I
don’t know if the way they connect to core has
changed.
Initially, people were complaining about call
drops and quality issues, and gave up on it. What
we found was that, when their leadership
proposed Voice over Wi-Fi, IT said: “We’re not
going to tell anyone it’s officially available
because we don’t want to support it, we don’t
have the bandwidth to do our job today, and we
can’t double the number of devices connected on
the network.”
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They were looking at the
perfect storm of doubling the
devices on the network and
having no headcount to do it.
Then they said: “If people are
smart enough to do it on their
own and can do it, that means
that they’re not going to
bother us. But for everybody
else, we don’t want them to
know.”
It was more of a practical
response to the lack of staffing,
because any time a service is
operationalized in an Art: One comment on millimeter wave, on an
enterprise, you have to develop service desk earlier question. For the sake of definition,
procedures and call flows, decide whether it is the millimeter wave is spectrum 24 GHz and higher. It
end user who’s going to maintain the devices, and tends to be a line-of-sight spectrum, where
how does that network group fit in when it can’t potentially you have to have a lot more radios
traverse the firewall. than you do with the lower frequencies, that can
penetrate walls and radiate through walls.
There’s a whole dance of all these employees and
the different silos within IT that have to be There are models that show that millimeter wave
involved when you take something live in a signals will bounce off walls and provide blanket
production environment. coverage. Not the same as lower frequencies that
go through the walls, but you’d be able to bounce
We found that the IT organizations were deciding:
things around walls and provide fairly full
“It may save the enterprise money, and it may
coverage.
provide connectivity in these dead areas where
there’s no cellular. But if we actually do this, the From the perspective of millimeter wave, there are
impact on the IT organization could be huge.” some unknowns with it. There are also unknowns
around the handset, where the antennas are. For
We saw people avoiding it, more than anything
instance, in the iPhone 4, the antennas’
else because of a fear of how bad it could get
performance was affected by the position of the
from an operations perspective.
hands, so that when you held the phone, you
Monica: With the second poll, we’re switching to degraded the signal pretty dramatically.
talk about the culture and business models in the
enterprise.
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |8|
There’s a lot of thought going into millimeter
wave and how it’s going to fit in the form factor
of the phone and work in production service.
Monica: At Qualcomm I saw a demo of millimeter
wave for indoor connectivity. They were looking
at exactly this kind of bouncing of the signal. It’s
very interesting and very promising. But to take
advantage of this you need to do more RF
planning than you would do, say, for your typical
Wi-Fi network, where you can put your access
points where you need them.
Although, even for Wi-Fi, if you want to have
good coverage, you need to do RF planning.
There’s no way around it.
It’s just that signal bouncing is not part of the
equipment features, because it’s so dependent on
whatever buildings, infrastructure, and materials
are in the environment. But there’s a huge
opportunity. Even for outdoor coverage with
millimeter wave, you can have a lot of bouncing
that helps.
Art: In a factory environment, if the floors are
wide open, they will be wide open spaces for
transmission, and you’ll probably get away with
quite a few less radios than in a carpeted-
enterprise environment, where you have a lot of
walls.
Monica: How do we go and introduce change, in
a way that it might be disruptive but also
accepted and embraced? If you’re too disruptive,
people might refuse to use the technology or
applications that you want to introduce. Is there
such a risk?
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Art: We’re involved in a
generational change here, with
people who have been digital
on mobile all their lives and
haven’t used a lot of the
enterprise services. There’s a lot
of questioning of “why do I have
this, when I’ve got my mobile?”
That’s also a CFO-level question.
If you’ve got a whole lot of
technology that’s being
purchased but not used by
people, perhaps you should
change.
It might be like what happened
with UNIX back in the day, when
all of us who used UNIX in college got promoted Art: In my experience, driving change in the
to leadership levels and threw all the enterprise is like farming. You have to wander
minicomputers out the door in a couple of years. around, plant seeds, show people stuff, and get
them to buy in over time. It’s proof of concepts.
I don’t know if it takes a changing of the guard to It’s a lot of ditch-digging to get people to buy
change the thinking, or whether there are people into the change and to really embrace it and say,
looking at it right now, saying: “How do I “Let’s do this.” Then the other thing that holds
integrate mobile voice services in with my devices, you back is your budget cycle.
instead of buying and provisioning a phone, and
buying a license slot for voice on the PBX, for You can do this incrementally through controlled
people who are never at their desk?” experiments. You need to have the architecture
group within a large multinational say, “We’re
For all the knowledge workers who aren’t going to do everything on mobile. We’re going to
deskbound, there are a lot of personal services divest of all these fixed services that we have on
that are provisioned to them that we could our desk. We’re going to have laptop and mobile.
probably divest of, if there were a clean and We’re going to be on Wi-Fi. We’re going to be on
painless way to integrate the mobile’s native cellular. We’re never going to be wired again.”
infrastructure into the enterprise back end.
That’s frankly where everyone’s going. The big
Monica: Do you think the enterprise has the right question is, as you move forward, what do you do
people and the right culture to introduce the to migrate the organization? Who’s going to
change? retain fixed services because of their role?
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |9|
Executives, lawyers, contact centers are all going
to continue to be wired, because the role requires
it. This also applies to executive admins and
people who are handling the main switchboard
for the organization. But there are a huge number
of people out there who don’t need anything
except their mobile.
How do you bring that mobile cleanly into the
enterprise, either on private LTE or on the public
cellular infrastructure? How do they get
connectivity so they have signal everywhere?
Without signal everywhere, it’s hard to make
these foundational changes.
Monica: Once you have a network that gives you
good coverage, you may have an environment
where employees see the ease of use of wireless
devices, and the IT department pushes wireless it
because it’s an easier to manage the wireless
services. But as you say, you want a gradual
introduction.
And it’s the planting of the seed that matters.
When you plant the seeds, what is the main
driver? Is it a better ROI, better security, more
convenience? How do those things rank?
Art: Unfortunately, it’s money. You have to show
how people are going to save money. You’re
going to cut maintenance costs. You’re going to
reduce capex for new employees. Budgeting in an
enterprise is a blood sport where you’re trying to
get money to do something. Software projects
always have priority over infrastructure.
You have to provide a pretty compelling story
around how you’re going to change things and
what the long-term benefits to the corporation
will be. It’s about money.
©Senza Fili, 2020
Secondarily, it’s about improving the experience
of the employees and potentially attracting or
retaining younger workers.
If you have an old-school environment, maybe it
won’t be attractive to younger workers. With baby
boomers retiring at 10,000 per day right now, in
the long term it’s going to be a very fierce
competition to go after the younger workers.
You’re going to want to have an environment
that’s technologically progressive, where younger
employees like to be in it and they would tell their
friends: “I work here and it’s an awesome
compute environment.”
Frankly, when it comes to making money, I’m not
sure how far that rises, compared to just getting a
paycheck. But there are a significant number of
business and tech people who have choices of
where to work. The working environment could
make a difference in whether or not you attract
and retain this type of talent, long-term.
Monica: When you talk about cost savings, where
are those coming from? Because we often tend to
stick so close to the network that we only think
about how much you save in the access, in the
core, in the equipment or in the deployment
costs.
We also need to look at the higher-level picture
and ask where the major cost savings are. Is it
equipment, operations, ability to retain people,
the ability of your employees to do what you’re
supposed to do, IoT-driven automation?
Art: There’s a lot of potential savings in network
infrastructure, even something as humble as a
cable. When we used to build out cubicles, you’d
Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular
build out four Cat5 cables. Each cable is $325 a
pop. If you go from four to one, you’re going to
cut a thousand dollars per cubicle out of your
construction costs. There are lot of little benefits
in greenfield construction.
I’ve seen places where they’ve done so much in
the way of wireless that a lot of their core
switches in the IDF closets are being used as
power supplies for LED lights in the ceiling. As
they switch over to LED lights, they’re redeploying
the Ethernet ports on their switches over to power
the light bars in the ceiling.
If they were using native services on the mobile
that were integrated into the corporation, the
annual cost for PBX licenses and maintenance for
services that employees are not using would go
away.
Many capex costs, either for a tech refresh or for a
new building, would disappear.
We see the potential that everything could be
wireless. Imagine that you have a charging pad at
your cubicle that you set your laptop on, and up
in the ceiling, you’ve got terabits of Wi-Fi and
terabits of cellular capacity available to the
devices, so that you would have the
high-performance environment that you used to
get only on wired, but without all the expenses of
cabling and other infrastructure.
In my enterprise telecom group, we moved 60%
of our people per year, on a campus of 12,000
people. It was $100 per person for each move.
Those numbers stacked up real fast every year. If
you start pulling those kinds of costs out of opex
for facilities, for moves, adds and changes, you’re
counting on some big savings.
|10|
Those are the kinds of things you take up to your eSIM Embedded SIM PLMN Public Land Mobile Network
CFO as part of the storytelling, to get your budget IBW In-building wireless PO Purchase order
dollars. IDF Intermediate distribution frame RAN Radio access network
IM Instant messaging RF Radio frequency
IoT Internet of things ROI Return on investment
Glossary IPsec Internet Protocol Security SAS Spectrum Access System
ISP Internet service provider SD-WAN Software-defined wide-area
3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership KPI Key performance indicator network
Project LTE Long Term Evolution SIM Subscriber identity module
AP Access point MAC Media access control SLA Service-level agreement
AR Augmented reality MSP Managed service provider VR Virtual reality
CBRS Citizens Broadband Radio NAT-T Network address translation WISP Wireless internet service provider
Services traversal
PBX Private branch exchange

©Senza Fili, 2020 Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |11|
About Corning
Corning is one of the world’s leading innovators in materials science, with a 168-year track record of life-changing
inventions. Corning applies its unparalleled expertise in glass science, ceramics science, and optical physics, along
with its deep manufacturing and engineering capabilities, to develop category-defining products that transform
industries and enhance people’s lives. Corning succeeds through sustained investment in RD&E, a unique
combination of material and process innovation, and deep, trust-based relationships with customers who are global
leaders in their industries.

About Art King

As part of the IBN Technologies team, Art leads the development of enterprise services definitions and business case
propositions for customers and partners. Art is Vice Chair of the Services Working Group in the Small Cell Forum. He came
to Corning via the SpiderCloud Wireless acquisition and was formerly a lead in IT architecture and operations for Nike Inc.
where he held various global roles over 10 years. Prior to Nike, he led the build out of two multinational engineering and
consulting organizations for an IP services network vendor in the service provider industry.

©Senza Fili, 2020 Dr. Enterprise or: How I learned to stop worrying and love cellular |12|
About Senza Fili
Senza Fili provides advisory support on wireless technologies and services. At Senza Fili we have in-depth expertise
in financial modeling, market forecasts and research, strategy, business plan support, and due diligence. Our client
base is international and spans the entire value chain: clients include wireline, fixed wireless, and mobile operators,
enterprises and other vertical players, vendors, system integrators, investors, regulators, and industry associations.
We provide a bridge between technologies and services, helping our clients assess established and emerging
technologies, use these technologies to support new or existing services, and build solid, profitable business models.
Independent advice, a strong quantitative orientation, and an international perspective are the hallmarks of our
work. For additional information, visit www.senzafili.com.

About Monica Paolini

Monica Paolini, PhD, founded Senza Fili in 2003. She is an expert in wireless technologies and has helped clients
worldwide to understand technology and customer requirements, evaluate business plan opportunities, market their
services and products, and estimate the market size and revenue opportunity of new and established wireless
technologies. She frequently gives presentations at conferences, and she has written many reports and articles on
wireless technologies and services. She has a PhD in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego
(US), an MBA from the University of Oxford (UK), and a BA/MA in philosophy from the University of Bologna (Italy).

© 2020 Senza Fili. All rights reserved. The views and statements expressed in this report are those of Senza Fili, and they should not be inferred to reflect the
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document are the property of their respective owners. Graphics from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove.