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Mehmet Yavuz, Co-Founder and CTO at Celona, discusses the evolution of private cellular networks and their increasing role in enterprise connectivity. Yavuz highlights the shift from experimental deployments to large-scale operational use cases, particularly in industrial and OT environments. He shares real-world data from recent deployments, emphasizing the practical advantages of private 5G in addressing challenges like coverage at scale, rapid deployment timelines, and high-interference environments. The presentation also previews technical innovations, including dual-mode 4G/5G access points, edgeless core architecture, and the integration of AI-driven operations (AI Ops) to simplify the management of these networks.
Reflecting on the company’s seven-year journey, Yavuz emphasizes how their thesis of making cellular enterprise-friendly has gained significant traction. He provides specific examples of current successes, such as Cargill’s deployment across numerous sites and Mariana Minerals’ rapid four-week setup of a 400-acre mining facility. A major highlight is the expansion of private 5G into “AI factories” and data centers, where extreme electromagnetic interference (EMI) often cripples traditional Wi-Fi. By utilizing cellular technology’s 30 dB noise immunity advantage, these facilities maintain critical connectivity for technicians and augmented reality applications. Yavuz argues that private 5G is not replacing Wi-Fi but acting as a necessary complement for mission-critical, high-mobility, and outdoor industrial needs.
The presentation concludes with a look at future-proofing through Agentic AI and the introduction of the AP20 dual-mode access point. This hardware allows for simultaneous 4G and 5G operation, supporting transition strategies for legacy devices while enabling modern high-bandwidth applications. Celona continues to scale globally by adapting to various regional spectrum regulations, such as CBRS in the United States and mid-band allocations in Europe and Asia. By shifting the focus from basic connectivity to operational KPIs and integrated OT management, Celona aims to further simplify the deployment of private cellular networks so they can be managed with the same ease as traditional local area networks.
Personnel: Mehmet Yavuz
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Puneet Shetty, who heads product and field engineering at Celona, discusses the company’s vision for the next generation of network operations by focusing on the evolution of their AIOps platform, Orion. Building on the foundation of Airflex and the successes seen with large-scale customers like Cargill, the presentation highlights a strategic shift toward meeting the needs of an AI-native workforce. Shetty explains that the traditional era of static dashboards and GUIs is coming to an end, necessitating a rethink of how autonomous network operations are delivered to support diverse partner requests and specialized industrial use cases.
The core of this new strategy is the Build Your Own Agent (BYOA) initiative, which aims to empower customers to create their own automation and troubleshooting tools. To facilitate this, Celona is introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service that provides comprehensive access to customer data, including configuration databases, time-series data, logs, and events that were previously only accessible to internal Celona teams. By exposing this granular data, Celona allows organizations to utilize their own approved AI tools to interact with their network infrastructure. This transparency is designed to move beyond basic recommendations toward a truly customizable automation framework.
Furthermore, the company is launching an agent playground where customers and partners can access baseline agents and skills developed by Celona to serve as templates for their own custom reports and dashboards. Shetty clarifies that while Orion previously existed as a dashboard within the Celona Orchestrator to provide root cause analysis and insights, this pivot allows the technology to live more directly within the customer’s own environment. The session transitions into a live demonstration of these agents in action, showing how users can communicate with Orion agents to manage complex network tasks, effectively bridging the gap between sophisticated cellular technology and simplified enterprise operations.
Personnel: Puneet Shetty
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Kseniia Zviagintceva and Puneet Shetty demonstrate the Solona Orion Playground, an agentic AI platform designed to transform network operations. By connecting a Cloud AI assistant (such as Claude, OpenAI, or Copilot) to Celona’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, users can access deep networking databases, logs, and time-series data far beyond what is available in standard management interfaces. This allows for the generation of highly customized reports and the execution of complex troubleshooting tasks through simple conversational prompts, effectively augmenting the capabilities of network engineers by providing granular, long-term data visibility and automated root cause analysis.
The demonstration highlights two primary use cases: on-demand reporting and automated troubleshooting. In the reporting example, Zviagintceva shows how the AI can generate multi-month network overview reports with specific visualizations–like eSIM usage per site–that currently do not exist in the standard Orchestrator UI. For troubleshooting, the system identifies a connection error on a smartphone by calling upon various “skills” to check access point health, core status, and SAS grants. Instead of a manual process involving multiple support tiers, the AI identifies an IP allocation failure and, with user approval, restores connectivity by restarting a service on the Kubernetes-based core, all within minutes.
Celona’s approach focuses on a “Build Your Own Agent” (BYOA) philosophy, moving away from static, “one-size-fits-all” dashboards. While Celona will provide a set of pre-defined sample agents and skills in its “playground,” the platform is designed to be hardware and LLM agnostic, allowing customers to use their preferred AI models and develop proprietary automation. Access is secured through API keys tied to existing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring data privacy and restricted action permissions. This initiative empowers network engineers to solve custom problems and participate in “hackathons,” shifting network management from a rigid development cycle to a dynamic, community-driven ecosystem.
Personnel: Kseniia Zvaigintceva, Puneet Shetty
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Prince Jose, joined by Puneet Shetty, introduces AirConnect, an open-source initiative designed to bridge the gap between complex enterprise connectivity and the rapidly growing field of physical AI and robotics. In industrial environments like smart plants and warehouses, robotics vendors often treat connectivity as an afterthought, yet they struggle to scale when faced with a multi-wireless reality involving private 5G, Wi-Fi, and public cellular networks. AirConnect serves as a hardware-agnostic, platform-agnostic multi-wireless manager that sits on top of edge AI platforms to intelligently steer application traffic based on real-time performance KPIs and defined policies.
The presentation highlights how different wireless technologies must coexist to support various robotic functions. Mission-critical tasks, such as fleet coordination and safety alerts, require the low latency and ubiquitous coverage of private 5G, whereas high-bandwidth tasks like software patches or model updates are better suited for Wi-Fi when a robot is docked. During a live demonstration from a smart plant, Jose showcases an edge AI platform utilizing AirConnect to manage these flows. When a person steps in front of an autonomous mobile robot (AMR), the system’s inference models immediately detect the hazard and utilize the private 5G path to send an instantaneous safety alert to a supervisor, ensuring the highest reliability for life-safety communications.
By releasing AirConnect as an open-source project rather than a commercial product, Celona aims to act as a facilitator for the entire robotics ecosystem. The initiative allows developers to define device policies that prioritize network interfaces, such as cellular first for messaging and Wi-Fi for bulk data, without being locked into specific hardware vendors. Shetty emphasizes that while some proprietary solutions exist, a generic, open-source approach is necessary to streamline the adoption of physical AI across diverse enterprise environments. This preview of AirConnect reflects Celona’s commitment to solving the practical, real-world integration challenges that arise when sophisticated autonomous systems meet complex industrial wireless infrastructure.
Personnel: Prince Jose, Puneet Shetty
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Vanlin Sathya and Puneet Shetty introduce the latest capabilities of the Celona AP20, a flagship access point that features a unique hardware design with dedicated 4G and 5G radios. Previously, the AP20 operated in either 4G or 5G mode, providing a software-defined upgrade path; however, Celona has now enabled concurrent 4G and 5G operation. This advancement allows enterprises to maintain support for legacy LTE devices while simultaneously deploying a future-proof 5G network on the same infrastructure. By utilizing a Self-Organizing Network (SON) algorithm to manage the 150 MHz of shared CBRS spectrum, the AP20 eliminates the need for a rip and replace strategy and enables innovative use cases, such as isolating guest BYOD traffic on 4G while reserving 5G for mission-critical industrial applications.
The presentation emphasizes the multi-mode utility of this technology in high-stakes environments like healthcare. Sathya highlights a deployment at Stanford Healthcare where the AP20 concurrently supports neutral host services to boost public carrier signals and private 5G for critical clinical communications, such as VoLTE and SMS for nursing staff. The platform offers a seamless onboarding experience using both physical SIMs and QR-code-based eSIMs, with integrated security features like IMEI-based SIM locking. By integrating these disparate cellular generations into a single enterprise-grade device that plugs directly into existing LAN switches, Celona simplifies the traditionally complex architecture of cellular infrastructure, making it as manageable as a Wi-Fi deployment.
Finally, Celona addresses the challenge of scaling these deployments through a new automated provisioning tool designed to replace the months-long timelines typical of traditional Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). This tool ingests configuration data from mobile network operators (MNOs) and regulatory bodies like SaaS to commission new sites in less than an hour. By automating the technical heavy lifting–including radio parameter adjustments and E911 validation–Celona can bring hundreds of retail or healthcare locations online within a four-week window. This combination of multi-generation hardware and rapid, automated software provisioning allows Celona to meet the high-volume, high-speed demands of large-scale enterprise customers effectively.
Personnel: Vanlin Sathya
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