You will need Certified Professional Installer (CPI) credentials in order to activate your Celona Access Points (AP) and request for their access to CBRS spectrum via the Spectrum Access System (SAS) services used by FCC in the United States.
In order to add CPI information to your sites configured within the Celona Orchestrator, a Certified Professional Installer must be added to your account. To add your installer details, click the account icon (top-right) and select Users from the dropdown.
On the Users page, click Add User to continue.
Add the contact details for your CPI and be sure to select Installer as the Role. Click Add and Orchestrator will send an email to the CPI inviting them to create an account.
Once the CPI has created a password and logged in they should add their CPI ID, and certificate to their profile. They would click the account icon, top-right, select Profile, and follow the instructions in the CPI Certificate Information panel.
With your CPI information added to the Orchestrator, we can proceed to configure your Celona APs.
Celona AP configuration and CPI validation
Select Access Points from the left hand menu, select the AP you want to configure.
The screenshot above shows the AP Details before the configuration has been completed. Click the pencil icon to add installation parameters.
For an indoor AP, only the latitude and longitude data are required. Outdoor APs require additional data including:
antenna model used,
azimuth and downtilt (in degrees).
In order to comply with FCC regulations, your CPI is responsible for adding, and verifying, the accuracy of information related to the AP installation at your site.
Once all of the data is entered, you must check the box for CPI compliance and hit Save. This should be repeated for each Celona AP deployed. If you have a large number of APs to provision, all of this information can be entered using the Celona API: to arrange access, please email us at support@celona.io.
Once the AP is provisioned, Celona Orchestrator will now begin the automated process of acquiring your spectrum grants from SAS. You can track the status of your SAS grants from the Access Points page of the Orchestrator. If an AP shows status a Provisioned, it is connected to the Orchestrator but awaiting a grant to start broadcasting. As soon as the grant is received and the radio is “live”, the AP status in the Orchestrator will change to Up.
As APs come up, our self-organizing network (SON) algorithms automate the process of frequency assignment and TX power configuration for each AP, ensuring your users and devices experience seamless handover across your coverage areas.
Domain Proxy service running on the Celona Edge interfaces with the SAS on behalf of all the Celona APs. It is the Domain Proxy service that sends periodic heartbeat request to SAS for each AP's grant to utilize the CBRS spectrum.
AP operations and the Domain Proxy service are decoupled on purpose to ensure that we maintain the states of the AP even if the AP is out of service momentarily. This allows Domain Proxy service on the Celona Edge to retain existing grants with SAS service by continuing to keep the periodic heartbeat.
During the heartbeats to the SAS service, provider of the service (eg. Google) will ensure 99.999% availability, with Celona cloud receiving live reporting of their status as part of the system integration. If the Domain Proxy on the Celona Edge loses connectivity to the SAS service for more than 240 seconds, as per FCC regulation, spectrum grants to the Celona APs will be suspended until the connection to the SAS service can be re-established from the Celona Edge.
The AP operational state as reported within the Celona Orchestrator will capture any issues during the SAS process - Registration, Spectrum Acquisition & Spectrum Grant Termination. Customers can also subscribe to AP state change monitoring API from the Celona Orchestrator (contact support@celona.io for access) and be alerted when AP operational state changes due to SAS related errors.
To check on the status of your new site, click the Celona logo (top-left) which will always take you to the main dashboard, showing you the status of all your sites, physical assets and connected devices.
Select your new site from the dropdown to view the site-specific status of your Celona APs and Edge Clusters. All up? Great, let’s connect some devices.
In this next article in the series, we will show you how to onboard CBRS capable devices onto your Celona network for connectivity.