Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired technology provider Athonet to strengthen its private cellular network push – a move that HPE Wireless CTO Stuart Strickland said will benefit the company’s existing Aruba Networks customers.

HPE will integrate Athonet’s software with Aruba’s private networking portfolio to combine the high capacity enabled by Wi-Fi with the coverage and mobility of 5G.

“We've wanted to partner with a private cellular network core company for a long time,” Strickland told SDxCentral. “We looked for a for companies that would have a similar vision and would also have developed their technology with private networks in mind rather than oriented toward the public backbone network.”

The primary target for this integration will be existing Aruba wireless LAN (WLAN) customers, according to Strickland, and software components of the WLAN, including SD-WAN, will be integrated with the private cellular networks.

“SD-WAN has been very important to our enterprise customers and it's my expectation that it will be as effective in the private cellular domain as it has been in the rest of the wireless domain,” he added.

It will take time to create intermediate translation layers between the Aruba and Athonet technology, but Strickland said the vendor believes “the time is right” to start integrating private cellular and Wi-Fi portfolios.

Enterprises are looking for 5G that is “complementary” to Wi-Fi and deeply integrated with the Aruba products already familiar to them, Strickland said.

“Our customers are interested in use cases for private 5G. They're not interested in cellular technology for its own sake,” he explained. “They don't want to learn the new vocabulary of some other 3GPP technology. They don't want to manage it in a different way with different tools.”

Aruba will  start with what Strickland called “a relatively light integration” of Athonet technology that will be helpful for its “most sophisticated customers who have an immediate need,” often those with wide areas of coverage, like airfields or warehouses.

Many other enterprises will slowly introduce 5G to be used in tandem with Wi-Fi for scenarios where determinism is needed in a network – such as having vehicles that always need to be connected – or to segregate cellular traffic from Wi-Fi traffic for different applications.

He noted the push to strengthen HPE’s private cellular network portfolio will still happen relatively quickly, with a goal of integrating Athonet technology into the general HPE portfolio this year, and full integration into Aruba’s Wi-Fi management systems in 2024.

“This is here now. I think we have a substantial start on it. And we want to make sure that we exploit that fully,” Strickland said.