Federated Wireless said it will move its headquarters a few miles from its current location in Arlington, Virginia, to the new, massive National Landing neighborhood, an area in Northern Virginia that's being redeveloped by real estate giant JBG Smith.

The area is anchored by the Pentagon, Amazon's HQ2, Boeing's global headquarters and Virginia Tech's STEM innovation campus. Now, Federated hopes to make a splash there with a private wireless networking showcase.

The move is part of the operator's effort to double down on private wireless as it expands beyond 3.5GHz CBRS spectrum management. Indeed, on Tuesday Federated announced the official launch of its subscription-based Private Wireless-as-a-Service offering.

"Designed around a 3-step customer success model, Private Wireless-as-a-Service gives enterprise and government customers the most direct and success-driven path to order, onboard and scale next-generation 4G and 5G private networks to power data-intensive applications and hyper-connected devices," the company explained.

Federated said it will continue to sell the offering through the Amazon Web Services cloud computing marketplace, but that today's announcement essentially formalizes its private wireless product offering.

Figure 1: (Source: Unsplash)

Iyad Tarazi, CEO at Federated Wireless, explained in an interview with Light Reading that the company's Private Wireless-as-a-Service is now a packaged solution that's simple and easy for customers to order. And that's part of why Federated's move to National Landing is important.

In 2020, JBG Smith spent roughly $25 million on CBRS spectrum licenses covering all of Arlington County, including National Landing. That allows the real estate developer to offer Federated's private wireless networking services across millions of square feet of office, residential and retail space.

Tarazi said Federated plans to kick things off with a 30,000-square-foot product showcase, featuring private wireless applications like virtual reality and robotics.

The operator's work with JBG Smith stems from its start as a spectrum management provider for the CBRS spectrum band. Today, Tarazi said Federated counts over 400 customers and 125,000 access points. "CBRS is quite healthy," he said.

But private wireless and CBRS spectrum management are just two of the items on Federated's plate. The company is still working to develop spectrum-sharing systems for the 6GHz band. "It's being adopted very well," Tarazi said.

He also said the company continues to make progress on the Spectrum Exchange, which it introduced last year. In fact, it is the product at the heart of Federated's work with JBG Smith. The real estate developer has agreed to put its spectrum holdings into Federated's Spectrum Exchange, thereby allowing other companies to lease its spectrum licenses.

"It's been a busy year," Tarazi said.

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— Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies, Light Reading | @mikeddano