- Gone are the days when private 5G and Wi-Fi were forever positioned as competing connectivity options for enterprises
- Celona is joining the two in its latest platform, Celona Orion – with a heavy emphasis on physical and agentic AI
- Orion consists of the whole enchilada: managing private 5G, Wi-Fi, public cellular and yes – satellite from Starlink
Talk about convergence. Everyone is getting into the act, including private networking vendor Celona, which today unveiled a unified platform that includes private 5G, Wi-Fi, public cellular and Starlink broadband satellite.
“You truly have everything wireless on a single platform available for the enterprise,” Celona co-founder and CEO Rajeev Shah told Fierce. “We're doing it with a very disruptive business model.”
It’s all happening under the Celona Orion brand, a new moniker for the “Agentic Converged Wireless Platform for the AI-native enterprise.”
That’s a mouthful, but suffice it to say, Celona says it’s defining a new category of wireless infrastructure built for physical and agentic AI. Orion introduces a unified commercial package that allows enterprise customers to deploy private 5G and Wi-Fi under a single subscription, with Wi-Fi access points included at no additional cost.
“That is intentional because we believe that eventually, we have to create a model that takes away all friction from enterprises adopting these converged networks,” Shah said. “Where we are going with physical AI, there is no way to provide that infrastructure without really utilizing the power of both.”
As part of the launch, Celona is introducing Celona AerConnect, an open-source wireless agent that lets robotics and AI-device makers embed multi-network connectivity into their products without having to be wireless experts.
The idea is for devices to move seamlessly between private 5G, Wi-Fi, public cellular and satellite using the connectivity best suited for the application.
It should be noted that Celona is not a Starlink reseller or distributor. Rather, it will manage the customer’s Starlink internet connection to reach remote and previously unconnected locations alongside their local area networks.
Celona Brain at the center
At the core of all this is something they’re calling the Celona Brain that runs in the cloud.
“That model has been trained on our six-plus years of networks that we have built the data from. That internal engineering data is then going into that model, and most importantly, and probably uniquely, we figured out a way of training the model on our actual software code,” Shah said.
“This model is now able to take actual queries, real-world problems, figure out what data is needed from the infrastructure access points and the edge OS, analyze that data, and give the root cause analysis and action to fix it. All of it end to end,” he said.
Internally, the entire platform, designed for the AI-native enterprise, has been close to a year in the making.
“We actually started demo and beta of this as early as April,” he said. “Our internal support and services team have now been using it for three months.”
The result? “It’s night and day,” he said. “Resolution times are extraordinary. They go from hours to a few minutes. The range of issues it catches … is extraordinary.”
Dashboards in the rearview
Speaking to the disruption aspect, Shah said Celona believes there’s a fundamental shift in how wireless operation teams interact with infrastructure.
“We have been used to dashboards. I think that world is actually going away. Everybody is getting used to the idea of basically asking the question to ChatGPT or Claude and getting the answer,” Shah said.
To take it a step further, Celona is introducing its first set of digital teammates to create a support system using AI.
“We’re going to have a 5G specialist agent, a Wi-Fi specialist agent and an IP networking specialist agent along with this product. When they have this agent, it’s literally like having a digital teammate,” he said. “In our UI, the operations team can go and give these agents jobs, either one-time jobs or they can give them recurring jobs and they can create a full workflow to say when you finish a job, the results of that job – do they go to another human or do they in turn get escalated to another agent? That’s the future of the world that we see coming.”
Robotics and the enterprise
Celona’s target market continues to be what he calls the “uncarpeted enterprise,” which includes manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, mining, data centers, construction and big-box retail. That’s where Celona has close to 200 customers and where robotics is getting adopted at a rapid rate, both indoors and outdoors.
Manufacturing, logistics and mines are especially popular places for robotics, but robots of some type or another are starting to show up in nearly every vertical, including hospitals.
“It is such a massive trend, I think we are probably a year from this becoming like truly mainstream,” he said. “I think we are crossing the chasm as we speak in terms of enterprise robotics and in a year, it’s just going to be everywhere.”
Robotics is one of the most visible and obvious places where people think about physical AI, but “we are seeing computer vision as being an equally important way that it’s pervasively being used."
People are using cameras that are highly AI enabled and capable of getting their eyes on everything from security to quality inspection and workflow automation.
Increasingly, “we are seeing actual humans in these facilities outfitted more and more with … what I’ll call it, connected sensors and devices to help improve their safety and productivity.”
Expect more to come on that front. Celona Orion is already in beta with customers and general availability is expected in the Q4 timeframe.
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