RF Connect Ready to Tackle CBRS, Wi-Fi 6 Opportunities

By J. Sharpe Smith, Senior Editor

June 11, 2019

RF Connect, a provider of enterprise wireless solutions, has achieved certification as both a CommScope Inbuilding Wireless (IBW) Premier Partner and a Ruckus Networks (now CommScope) CBRS Partner.

“RF Connect has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with CommScope,” said Jeff Hipchen, executive vice president at RF Connect. “This partnership positions us to offer enterprise customers solutions for more intelligent, safer and better-connected buildings that deliver superior tenant experience, higher revenue potential and operational benefits.”

Access to the expanded solutions portfolio positions the company to deliver enterprise indoor cellular coverage as well as business- and mission-critical connectivity for users, services and smart building applications that require improved performance, predictability and security.

“One of the advantages of CBRS that we didn’t have with DAS is you can control your own destiny in term of the carriers’ signals,” Hipchen said. “There is a lot of interest because of that. While enterprises want to own the Private LTE, they want another company, like RF Connect, to operate it.”

The new CBRS LTE portfolio from Ruckus Networks, which consists of CBRS-band LTE APs and associated cloud services, allows organizations to deploy private LTE networks to address a wide range of use cases including data connectivity, staff communications, building monitoring, remote access control, video security, environment control and more, as well as industry-specific applications such as patient monitoring, asset tracking and location-based services.

CBRS isn’t the only improvement coming to the wireless communication toolkit. Wi-Fi is getting a major upgrade.

“Wi-Fi 6 will operate in multiple bands including pristine spectrum at 6 GHz when it becomes available,” said Mike Collado, marketing vice president, RF Connect. “There are so many users and devices riding on the current standard and unlicensed spectrum [2.4 GHz and 5 GHz], that the performance gets degraded. So Wi-Fi 6 will be a totally new wireless paradigm with compelling performance and reliability benefits.”

IBW Partners, part of the CommScope PartnerPRO program, are authorized to successfully design, commission, provide carrier coordination as well as optimize a CommScope IBW solution. Premier partnership signifies that the partner has demonstrated their independent ability to deliver superior value to customers and generate new, mutually beneficial, customer opportunities.

Advancements in Wi-Fi and CBRS open a lot of opportunities for companies like RF Connect, that serve the enterprises and campus side.

“There are two different categories of CBRS [Priority Access Licenses (PAL) and General Authorized Access (GAA) users]. That is where our CommScope/Ruckus relationship becomes interesting,” Hipchen said. “Ruckus provides an unlicensed business class data solution, which could be used in the GAA spectrum. A commercial network has a higher level of SLA, such as mission critical, health care, where you can’t have concerns about latency and resiliency, that falls into the PAL category , which is what CommScope brings to the table. There will be still be opportunities for both of those types of solutions that fit their own needs.”

Health care, education and manufacturing will be big verticals for CBRS, according to Hipchen, but all markets will see the impact of CBRS to some degree.

“Both manufacturing and healthcare have applications for wireless mobility plus the need for flexibility, low latency and high security,” he said. “If you are going to deploy a mission-critical application in manufacturing, latency, reliability and security are big issues. It opens up a new aspect have those capabilities.”