Beyond the Bandwidth: altafiber’s 5G Testing Lab Opens Doors for Businesses
“What are you guys up to? What are you going to do?”
Those questions of curiosity were sparked by Scott Rash, President/CEO of the Wright State University Foundation, when he learned that Cincinnati-based altafiber won the Primary Access License for Greene County, Ohio, during the FCC’s CBRS auction in 2021. Initially, altafiber was going to use the license for a fixed wireless offering for internet in rural areas, but the company instead opted to focus on fiber in that area of business. John Scola, Director of altafiber’s Mobility Program, still had a vision of what the company could accomplish with that spectrum.
“I asked the business, ‘Well, can I use those frequencies and those assets and start marketing that toward our business customers, large business customers,’” Scola recounted to CFX. “They said yes, but one of the things I needed was a lab. I wanted to go test all of this.”
Scola saw Dayton as an ideal place to build the lab as altafiber was expanding toward that area with its fiber program. It was then that Rash grew curious about altafiber’s plans, in which he also indicated that the WSU Foundation had available real estate for altafiber to use.
Three years later, the 5G Testing Lab is nestled across the street from WSU in Fairborn, Ohio. The building allows businesses to get hands-on education about indoor and outdoor 4G and 5G technology used for private networks spanning large buildings and open areas. The initial verticals altafiber is targeting include health care, logistics and manufacturing.
“altafiber has taken a leap of faith knowing where the puck is going to be, but I’m fascinated by what these people walk away with and how they react to it,” Rash said.
The facility itself has a handful of rooms that enable companies to bring in their own equipment and analyze specific use cases. For example, a security camera company can come to the testing lab and see how a 5G private network would work with its camera solutions. Or a county could want WiFi in a park and already has a self-support tower on the property, so altafiber could show how it’d use WiFi access points to expand connectivity across a property.
Though it’s still in its early stages of adoption, Scola sees more companies going down the wireless route. It’s an avalanche waiting to happen, he said, but so far, the companies and leaders he’s talked to have been more than eager to invest in the technology and take a chance.
“All I’ve done for three years is educate people on what this is,” Scola said. “So now the buying decisions are starting to happen. We’re actually selling equipment, we’re selling networks and they’ve been in production for eight or nine months, and [customers] are going, ‘Yes, this all proved out.’ All we need is one in each vertical and then everybody will follow, right?”
The 5G Testing Lab also serves as an opportunity for students at WSU. The WSU Foundation works with altafiber and Nokia—which is also a partner with the lab—to offer 5G certification courses to students so they can get real working experience.
But that’s just part of the long-term vision Scola and Rash share. “If we could, at some point time, turn this whole facility and this whole area into a technology hub of driving business and economic activity, I think [Rash] and I would say the vision that we talked about three years ago is starting to come to fruition,” Scola said. – Noah Ziegler