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.

Highway 9 doesn’t foresee its Mobile Cloud replacing Wi-Fi across all enterprise organizations, but Sequeira expects to see early adopters among a few industries. For instance, he says environments where mobility and connectivity, such as higher education, manufacturing, and commercial real estate, are needed in lockstep are good candidates for this technology. He also expects healthcare to be interested in how to maintain secure, mobile connections across hospital campuses.

“Connecting to mobile devices has become a utility for many industries. A lot of people have invested a lot of money into Wi-Fi, and I don’t think it replaces that,” says Sequeira. “We will address these new use cases, where mobility is important, where coverage is important, where connection is important.”

Industry watchers say bringing cellular technology to enterprise environments could address connectivity challenges for businesses that need higher levels of connectivity but cannot deploy their own carrier-grade network.

“Private mobile networking and private 5G have the opportunity to fundamentally transform enterprise communications and accelerate digital automation,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, in a statement. “But today’s offerings aren’t forward-leaning or ready for widespread enterprise usage because they’re still complex and telecom-centric.  What enterprises need is a simplified and cloud-native approach, essentially a mobile cloud, and that’s what Highway 9 is bringing to market.”

Customers, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., can deploy a private mobile network that will provide connectivity in places where Wi-Fi doesn’t always perform. For instance, on a campus with indoor and outdoor resources as well as garages and staircases. For MIT, Highway 9’s Mobile Cloud allows the IT team to provide secure connectivity across the campus.

“In our dynamic environment across the MIT campus, we need to ensure that students, faculty, staff, and others can always connect securely to their apps and data … wherever they are and whatever they’re doing,” said Mark Silis, vice president information systems & technology at MIT, in a statement. “The Highway 9 Mobile Cloud provides a platform-level solution to help us do this, while saving us significant time through their cloud-based operations and tiers of integration.”

Startup snapshot: Highway 9 Networks

• Year founded: 2020
• Funding: $25 million
• Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
• CEO: Allwyn Sequeira
• What they do: Enterprise Mobile Cloud
• Competitors: Distributed antenna systems (DAS), which extend carrier cellular networks into the enterprise
• Named customer: MIT