Verizon’s new “Mobile Onsite Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)” trailer is no bigger than the average food truck but serves up a rich menu of connectivity: not just the 4G and 5G wireless that the carrier’s standard Cell on Wheels (COW) trailers provide, but also private 5G, SD-WAN, private mobile edge compute and satellite backhaul.
In fewer buzzwords, it’s a portable patch for business customers who need a quick upgrade to their connectivity. The carrier announced this new venture Thursday, revealing that it’s been deployed for its first tests at the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin's Waterton, Colorado, facility.
The release attests a setup time of “a matter of hours” to put this 10-foot trailer to work collecting and relaying sensor and video data.
The enterprise-level functions onboard are key to the business plans of carriers that want to branch out into value-added services instead of selling undifferentiated connectivity. (See also, T-Mobile’s recent launch of 5G “network slicing.")
But so far, high-powered tasks like providing private 5G service to a business, allowing it to run apps that benefit from “edge computing” processing deployed closer to their premises, and using SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) services to tie everything together have been more often confined to a carrier’s fixed infrastructure.
What we’re going to call Verizon’s little NaaS experiment also features the option of satellite connectivity. Today that relies on satellites on geostationary orbit, meaning slow upload speeds and noticeable latency, but Verizon says this trailer can work with low-Earth-orbit systems. Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper could be one such option, since the two companies announced a collaboration in October 2021.
Verizon’s release also notes more direct upsides for consumers from this sort of cyber-COW: for instance, ensuring priority connectivity at a crowded event like the Super Bowl or ensuring public-safety communications during a weather emergency.
