During the week of August 27th CBRS-Alliance members and government representatives gathered in Louisville Colorado at the CableLabs facility for the first CBRS OnGo™ Interoperability Test Event. The attendees consisted of a Spectrum Access System (SAS) Administrator, Citizen Band Service Device (CBSD) vendors, Domain Proxy (DP) vendors, End Unit Device (EUD) vendors and operators and representatives of various government agencies.
CBRS-Alliance is an industry organization focused on driving the development, commercialization and adoption of OnGo™ shared spectrum solutions. The CBRS Alliance enables a robust ecosystem through the management of the OnGo brand, and the OnGo Certification Program. OnGo provides an in-door and out-door LTE network that is cost-effective and can be used for either data offload or private LTE and IOT applications.
The testing covered critical functions of the CBRS ecosystem, “end-to-end” test cases, and operational flexibility. The success of the event shows the maturity of the WinnForum specification and the overall readiness of all parts of the ecosystem for Initial Commercial Deployment (ICD). This event demonstrated the ease that CBSD vendors were able to register on a SAS and become operational. One such example was a CBSD vendor and SAS administrator that had not previously interacted were able to exchange information, register the CBSD and became fully operational all in less than 30 minutes.
While certification testing focuses on protocol testing with test harnesses, this event was conducted as a real-world deployed system. With over 850 scheduled test interactions, as well as several additional unscheduled test scenarios being executed, we observed no equipment failures or unexplained results. The test cases included “end-to-end” scenarios in which EUD attached to operational CBSDs and were able to successfully access and surf the Internet.
“Last week’s Interoperability Test Event was an incredible illustration of the power of collaboration and as a result of this cooperation – across member organizations, industry liaisons and the CBRS Alliance Working Groups – we proved that the OnGo ecosystem will offer tremendous benefits to end users across market verticals,” said Alan Ewing, CBRS Alliance Executive Director. “Notably, this event provided the first ever connection attempt between certain devices and SAS’. The connections were quickly made in each case and underscored the quality of the OnGo specifications and the maturity of vendor implementations.”
In addition to hosting this event, CableLabs through Kyrio (a wholly owned subsidiary of CableLabs) supplied the PKI certificates used during the event which allowed the CBSDs and DPs to quickly switch between the SASs without having to reload new certificates. This greatly reduced the testing time and eliminated issues related to incorrect certificates being used.
As an active member of the CBRS-Alliance, CableLabs continues to contribute to the specification work that the CBRS-Alliance is developing. CableLabs also holds a position of co-lead in the Test and Certification working group which was fundamental input on this Interoperability Test Event.
For more information how to get involved in the OnGo movement please contact the CBRS-Alliance. To learn how the cable industry can benefit from OnGo please contact Luther Smith by clicking below.
