Largest U.S. Open-Access Municipal Private 5G Network in the City of Las Vegas

A case study on Juniper Networks website highlights that the City of Las Vegas is building the largest open-access municipal private 5G network in the U.S. The city’s wireless network uses Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, a band that was previously reserved for the U.S. government. 

The City of Las Vegas aims to be a model smart city by 2025. To achieve that, it relies on a private 5G network and a portfolio of smart city capabilities to facilitate a host of community and transportation services. The network has been completed in the city’s Innovation District, and the municipality is rapidly expanding the 5G service to surrounding areas.

“We want to make life better for our community,” says Michael Sherwood, chief innovation and technical officer for the City of Las Vegas. “We are building amenities that help people in our community, whether they are visiting for one day or live here for 50 years. We want to provide those amenities in the most efficient way possible, and that’s what connectivity does.”

The city’s network spans public spaces and serves as a platform for local businesses, government, and educational institutions to develop solutions that benefit the entire Las Vegas community.

Systems integrator NTT worked with the city to design and build the network. The future-ready network is open and intelligent, allowing any third-party application or end-user device to connect. “You want to be open to what the future has in store,” says Sherwood. “We can connect all types of new equipment..”

NTT has been working with City of Las Vegas (CoLV) for a long time. In a NTT Technical Review article in 2019, they explained their B2B2X model of working with CoLV.

In a press release coinciding with MWC Las Vegas in 2022, NTT introduced Celona, another partner of this smart city project:

As the lead in a multi-party, multi-phase project for CoLV, NTT provides its P5G platform which encompasses the LTE/5G network as a service that integrates security, control, and privacy by design and allows enterprises and other customers to flexibly secure, scale, and segment their networks.  P5G local area network (LAN) technology provider, Celona, is working with NTT on this project. One of Celona’s contributions is a software-defined operational model that can track key performance indicators for an open ecosystem of market-leading device and app providers. “We are excited about our ongoing collaboration with NTT and the opportunity to deliver unique operational agility and efficiency to the end users on the City of Las Vegas’s expanding P5G network,” said Rajeev Shah, Founder, and CEO of Celona.

The goal is for the network to serve as an open platform available to local businesses, government, and educational institutions for deploying innovative solutions that enrich the lives of citizens and visitors to Las Vegas. NTT is working with partners to more than double the number of network access points (APs) throughout Las Vegas. Unlike most Citizens Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) deployments, which are in-building or industrial, this network extends across public spaces. It’s also the first network of its size to be open to third-party APs and end-user devices. It puts Las Vegas well on the path to becoming a technology hub for citizens and organizations within the city limits.

The City of Las Vegas municipality, its stakeholders, and business community will benefit from the capabilities of a P5G network, including ultra-low latency, greater reliability, massive capacity, seamless security, and flexible management. As additional use cases arise, the network will become a framework for revenue generation that can improve the city’s bottom line while supporting network maintenance, expansion, and enhancement. This network model, and the new services and applications launched in CoLV, can be replicated and marketed respectively in cities across the US.

NTT has their case study on CoLV here. Celona explains how they are working together with NTT to deliver the continent's biggest Private 5G LAN network in Las Vegas here.

Dell, which is another partner of NTT in this smart city project has a brief white paper on this here.

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