NTT is maintaining its private 5G market pressure, expanding a deal with the city of Las Vegas to deploy and provision a far-reaching private network that can support local businesses, government, educational facilities.

The work will see NTT tap into its ecosystem to more than double the number of network access points already deployed in Las Vegas. These access points will use Citizen Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) and be open to third-party access points and end-user devices that support that band.

Shahid Ahmed, NTT group EVP and CEO of its New Ventures and Innovation division, said in an interview that the NTT-managed service will use the CBRS Generally Authorized Access (GAA) spectrum tier, which is the lowest of three tiers of access and has the least amount of protection from interference. However, it’s the free tier, which could be appealing.

CBRS spectrum includes a total of 150 megahertz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. Access to that spectrum is through a multi-tiered access program that includes tier-one incumbents with “protected status,” including the Department of Defense for use by Navy ship radars and registered fixed satellite receiving stations; a tier two for “priority access licenses” (PAL); and tier three for “general authorized” (GAA) channels.

Access to that spectrum is through a group of Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators comprised of CommScope, Federated Wireless, Google, and Sony.

“We've tested this out in different parts of the city and different applications,” Ahmed said. “The thing with GAA is you can tell the SAS to allocate for that spectrum in that area for that purpose, so you can pre-assign those bands for that specific region or location.”

NTT will manage the CBRS access, with Ahmed admitting, “it's not 100% reliable yet, so it has to be fairly well structured and manage as an ongoing basis.”

The expansion builds on past work between NTT and the city. This began in late 2018 when NTT conducted a “smart city” proof of concept that used sensors, IoT, big data, and predictive analytics to improve safety, situational awareness, and traffic congestion in Las Vegas. This evolved into the city's Accelerate Smart project in 2020, which provides real-time alerts of safety conditions and maintenance issues.

Ahmed noted that NTT is working with LAN equipment and platform provider Celona on the latest expansion to bring a “very CIO-centric solution, which is kind of what we need in the city of Las Vegas.”

Celona recently unveiled a free private cellular device certification program targeted at interoperability testing of 4G LTE and 5G end-user equipment running on its enterprise 5G LAN. The move tackles a significant hurdle toward broader private network deployments.

The city will be responsible for procuring the devices needed to access the network, including any devices for schools or students.

NTT’s management of the network will include the ability to provide artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) insight that the city can also use to boost services, but Las Vegas will control the roadmap.

“It's their network and they will drive the requirements, they will drive the roadmap, they will drive the applications that go on top of the network,” Ahmed said. “One of the key features of this network is that it's open, which means they're going to invite any third party in the city, whether it's a small business, or a kid in the garage wanting to connect and do some interesting things at the network level and innovate.”

NTT is also downplaying any comparison of the service to city driven municipal WiFi initiatives. These are efforts by municipalities to partner with vendors in deploying citywide WiFi networks.

“Muni WiFi is not a scalable solution,” Ahmed said, noting that an automotive company NTT is working with abandoned its WiFi network that covered thousands of cars sitting in a parking lot that were receiving over-the-air updates for a private wireless network.

“5G offers a fraction of access points needed to support the same coverage area with higher performance, more secure, more reliable, so that was one of the design principles behind this,” Ahmed explained.

The Las Vegas expansion comes on the heels of NTT striking a deal with VMware to provide managed edge and private 5G services targeted at those rapidly expanding markets. That agreement has VMware adopting NTT’s Private 5G Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform that the Japanese telecom giant initially unveiled last year. VMware will plug this platform into its edge offering.

Conversely, NTT is using VMware’s Edge Compute Stack, which was launched at last year’s VMworld event, to power its new edge-as-a-service product. The VMware platform is an integrated virtual machine (VM) and container-based stack for edge-native apps. The NTT product will include its private 5G NaaS platform, though each service can be adopted separately if needed.

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