A handful of former VMware executives recently bounded out of stealth mode with $25 million in financing and bold plans to make a mark in the competitor-rich and uptake-light private 5G network market.

The new entity is Highway 9 Networks, which was founded by four former VMware executives and is headed by CEO Allwyn Sequeira. The executive said the firm is hitting the market with its Mobile Cloud platform that serves the specific private network needs of the enterprise space.

Sequeira explained the Highway 9 Networks’ platform acts as the control point for connecting enterprise devices and can integrate with existing IT infrastructure and security policies to automate and manage a full mobile stack. The cloud-nature of the platform also allows for a quicker deployment timeline compared with traditional mobile network operator (MNO)-based private network offerings.

“Everything's cloud-based,” Sequeira said of Highway 9 Networks’ platform. “We believe this is the requirement that must be met for you to have the minimum viable offering and the first-generation private networks do not have this.”

Highway 9 Networks’ business model is based on a subscription-as-a-service offering. This includes a three-year subscription fee based on the number of radios an enterprise would need and the software needed to run the service. Sequeira said Highway 9 Networks provides access to validated third-party radios.

“We are embracing the best-in-class radios in the enterprise, and we are building a platform that's first and foremost a cloud platform,” Sequeira said. “Cloud by definition is extensible to the ecosystem.”

These hardware items then plug into Highway 9 Networks’ self-developed network cloud and core that can be deployed in edge locations. Sequeira described these as being “nimble, microcores for 4G and 5G that we deploy at the edge.” This includes the ability to run in an on-premises environment, on bare metal in a colocation, or can be deployed on a hyperscaler cloud environment close to the edge.

Sequeira saidthat his team at VMware found that when it was deploying a network core for Dish Network, the Nokia core it was using needed “tons and tons of CPUs and cores. It was like a mainframe.” This, he added, means those telco-focused cores cannot scale down easily to handle more limited enterprise-level deployments.

The subscription model is similar to what other vendors, like Celona, offers, but Sequeira added that the Highway 9 Networks model is completely virtualized, which others don’t offer.

“We can have our customers do self service on the portal or we can do it in conjunction where they do the every day looking and they can have us look over their shoulders four support much like a Google Cloud or an Amazon Cloud or VMware Cloud,” Sequeira explained. “We make this the Mobile Cloud and everything we can see we can give them entitlements, it's multi-tenant, and, in turn, they can delegate to their IT operators.”

Highway 9 Networks is entering a market that includes many competitors and is evolving slower than expected. Sequeira said this is because current offerings are either over-built for what most enterprises need or are too complicated and/or costly for those needs.

“The first versions of private networks were all coming in from the telco world and they wanted to build these telco networks,” Sequeira said. “What they missed out entirely on is that in the enterprise there is no room for [this complexity].”

One area where Highway 9 Network’s aligns with other vendors is its reliance on the quasi-licensed Consumer Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) shared spectrum band, and specifically the least protected general authorized (GAA) bands. Sequeira explained that this band is the most practical to use in most locations due to the depth of spectrum available, though in some locations that might be near military installations the firm can tap into some of the more tightly regulated bands.

Sequeira gains access to that spectrum through established Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators Google and Federated Wireless.

Highway 9 Networks is already touting a handful of customer wins, including with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where Sequeira said it replaced a Celona installation.

“Celona was missing the seamless network integration and enterprise integration, and they were missing the ability to integrate the best-in-class radios and nor where they able to built a cloud-based platform,” Sequeira said.

Highway 9 Networks’ next steps are to continue to build functional relationships directly with enterprise customers to show that its platform can meet their needs. This will in turn lead to work-of-mouth expansion opportunities and the ability to build a sales channel with established networking value-added resellers (VARs).

“We're going to accounts that got burned once and did not quite meet the bar, so there’s some level of education coming there,” Sequeira said. “But the No. 1 thing is when you have a pain point and we solve it in a simple fashion. There's no substitute for doing the heavy lifting of getting a product that just simply works and that inserts routinely into your enterprise, and you get the economics right. You solve a pain point with the right economics, with the complete functional platform that I think has been missing when you don't have a fully functional product.”