Startup Highway 9 Networks delivers private mobile networks for enterprises

Highway 9 Networks recently emerged from stealth mode with $25 million in seed funding and a vision to provide enterprise companies with SaaS-based private mobile networks that would eliminate gaps in coverage by incorporating cellular technology.

Highway 9, founded by veteran leaders from VMware, introduced the Highway 9 Mobile Cloud, which the company says enables voice and data coverage everywhere, enabling enterprise organizations to have carrier-grade cellular coverage. Founder and CEO Allwyn Sequeira created Highway 9—named after the roadway that connects many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley—with several former members of the telco and edge business unit at VMware, including CTO Debashis Basak, vice president of R&D Serge Maskalik, and senior director of R&D Sachin Thakkar. The premise is to bring telco-grade cellular coverage to enterprises to eliminate gaps in coverage, support AI-driven apps, and provide always-on mobile data.

Sequeira explains Highway 9 is taking advantage of a few factors that make it possible for the company to equip enterprise organizations with private mobile networks. “The combination of availability of free 3.5 GHz bands on smartphones, tablets, and other devices, and the new software-defined 5G stack, as well as a large ecosystem of 5G capable devices, gives us a great starting point to develop the appropriate solution,” Sequeira says.

“The network is first and foremost built on private cellular technology, and all the mobile devices become first-class citizens of this network. So, the same technology that is used to run an AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon 5G technology is now available to be leveraged in enterprises because the FCC allowed the licensing of the spectrum,” he says. “It’s also important to note that 5G technology is a lot more sophisticated than say Wi-Fi or fixed LANs because when you’re driving in a car, your connection goes from one tower to the other tower, and you don’t think twice about it.”

Highway 9 Mobile Cloud includes three components, or layers, to its complete system. For the first layer, Highway 9 sends cellular radio devices to their customers, who can then install them similar to Wi-Fi access points—but fewer because for one radio device customers would need three to five Wi-Fi devices. IT operators install the cellular radio devices in their environment. With the cellular radio devices installed, the environment is then identified and auto-provisioned to the Highway 9 Mobile Cloud.

The second layer is an edge component that contains the 5G protocol layers that enable communications between the cellular radio devices and the packet cores in the control plane on the edge. The edge component with the control plane can be deployed in a few ways: as a virtual machine on premises, on a Kubernetes system, on a standard server, or via the cloud, depending on customer preference. The third component is cloud-based management system provided by Highway 9 that monitors the environment from configuration, providing dashboards and reporting for enterprise customers.