# Celona expands private 5G to meet the rise of physical AI > Source: > Published: 2026-08-12 14:28:58+00:00 Featured Story ## Rakuten faces surge in 4G, 5G costs as KDDI cuts it off The termination of KDDI's roaming agreement is forcing Rakuten to plug holes in network coverage at some expense. Celona adds Wi-Fi, satellite and public support to private 5G along with agentic AI to manage connectivity across technologies and physical AI workloads. Private wireless network specialist Celona is expanding from its 5G cellular roots with a new offering that includes Wi-Fi, satellite and public network support along with agentic AI to manage it all. The proposition, called Orion, is described as "an agentic converged wireless platform" and will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. For the first time, Celona is adding Wi-Fi to its traditional private 5G solution. It will offer Wi-Fi 7 access points along with 5G radios as part of its multi-year subscription model for enterprises. The intent is to give enterprises easier options to use both wireless technologies for what they do best: private 5G for "reach and deterministic performance" for autonomous machines and Wi-Fi for "bandwidth-intensive applications," according to the company. Celona CEO Rajeev Shah told Light Reading that customers were having to make "a hard choice" between Wi-Fi and cellular. "With this, we're addressing that and saying, you don’t have to make this false choice ... and our orchestrator can manage the networks together." For enterprises that also have Starlink connectivity, such as for remote or temporary sites, the Orion orchestrator can now also manage these links alongside 5G and Wi-Fi to give users an "end-to-end view" across technologies. Celona is not distributing or reselling Starlink, however. The company's orchestrator product has also been updated to simplify operations for converged networks with agentic AI capabilities. Based on its own model, called Celona Brain, the new Orchestrator AI taps into the knowledge and experience of the company's engineers to create a library of skills and agents. "It's like having the entire Celona engineering team at your fingertips all the time," said Shah. This will come with four or five pre-built agents that are like "digital teammates" for the enterprise wireless teams. They will be able to give jobs to the agents, or for example, say: "'When something like this happens, go and diagnose and fix this,'" he added. Most of Celona's enterprise customers are in manufacturing, logistics, mining, ports, retail and transportation sectors. The product revamp is a sign of the times for how private wireless networks are changing in these environments with the increasing use of robotics and prevalence of physical AI. "One of the most important drivers for network modernization is robotics in these environments … Every customer I've spoken to, the new robots they're getting from their vendors have GPUs and are running inference models on them," said Shah. As more robotic machines are running AI inferencing on the device, this requires "deterministic" wireless connectivity and coordination with other compute elements on the network edge, he explained. To address these scenarios, Celona is launching an open-source initiative for a wireless agent called AerConnect that manages multi-network connectivity on robotics and AI devices. Device makers can use the open-source agent to allow devices to move "seamlessly" across private 5G, Wi-Fi, public cellular and satellite. "It's a significant market gap where robotics device makers don't have the necessary wireless capabilities, and in turn, our customers struggle to get value out of these converged networks. Until that happens, we want to accelerate that," he said. Ceramic tile manufacturer Del Conca USA uses multiple wireless technologies for different purposes in its operations, according to Luca Chichiarelli, head of IT operations. "As we expand automation, we're connecting more devices, systems, workflows, and workers in more places than ever before. Bringing those networks together under a common platform can simplify operations while maintaining the security, reliability, and control our business requires," he said in a statement in Celona's Orion news announcement. Celona was [founded in 2019](/5g/startup-celona-targets-private-lte-5g-for-enterprise) by veterans from wireless technology firms including Aruba, Cisco, Federated Wireless and Qualcomm. It has nearly 200 customers, most of which are in the US. It has expanded internationally in the last two years, counting customers in the UK, Europe, Latin America, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, many of which are American firms with operations in these locations. It sells to enterprises via more than 200 channel partners, such as service providers Verizon and stc; systems integrators NTT Data and Capgemini; and Wi-Fi and IT channel resellers, such as INS. Shah said the company has seen "extraordinary growth" in the last 12 months in terms of new customers, pace of deployments and "the pace of new things like robotics and AI showing up as workloads on our networks." The introduction of Orion reflects this change. "Celona is not going to narrowly focus on private 5G specifically, given that we are now a converged network offering. For us, the wireless edge is going to get massively modernized as a result of physical AI, and ... that's our focus. What part of that workload is on cellular, and what is on Wi-Fi is beside the point," he said.