7. Public Sector
According to a report by Analysys Mason, there were 13 private 5G network announcements in the public sector this year, compared to 21 LTE announcements. By 2027, the public sector will account for 10% of private network spending.
One company working on government adoption is cybersecurity firm Netscout, which offers visibility into 5G network performance and helps protect against attacks.
“There’s a lot going on in this space,” says Rick Fulwiler, chief solutions architect at NetScout. “We contract directly with the military and provide them with service guarantees.” For example, bad actors might launch resource exhaustion attacks, or denial-of-service attacks. “They send out a flood of registration messages to target the infrastructure itself,” Fulwiler says.
On the plus side, 5G access is based on SIM cards, he says: “You can’t hack into the network like you can with WiFi, so that’s one of the main advantages in terms of security.”
5G also comes equipped with the latest authentication technologies, allowing businesses to enforce security policies on users and devices.
8. Utilities
According to a report from Analysys Mason, there have been seven private 5G network announcements in the utility sector this year, compared with 28 LTE announcements. Most of these networks have been deployed locally at sites such as power plants or wind farms, Kasujee said. However, several utilities are planning to roll out wide-area private networks across their transmission networks.
Michael Misrahi, U.S. communications leader at Ernst & Young, said utilities are certainly embracing 5G: “5G can handle more connection points in dense areas, and it can provide a different kind of internet, with higher capacity and lower latency.”
Businesses have a variety of options to expand and improve coverage with private 5G, he said: “More power, more access points, physical security of the access points. You have a lot more control than you would have over a public network.”
Private 5G isn’t fully realized yet
Ernst & Young’s Misrahi said private 5G has yet to be adopted by corporate IT departments as a general-purpose business networking tool, and there is still a long way to go.
Deploying private 5G requires providing connectivity across a wide range of device form factors, including all legacy devices that may be in use. At a more strategic level, the decision to upgrade wireless networks is often made incrementally by different people, making it difficult to adopt a comprehensive 5G strategy.
Additionally, different industries and company sizes have different needs, so vendors want to be present where their largest markets are.
“It’s almost a dilemma,” Misrahi said. “Nobody wants to lean completely into it. It’s very difficult for the enterprise 5G ecosystem to move forward compared to the consumer market, which is very large.”
Jason Lee, mobility research manager at International Data Corp., said accurate industry figures for private 5G rollouts are hard to come by, with most vendors not publishing their numbers.
One of them, according to Lee, is Nokia. The company reported 635 private wireless customers in July, up from 485 at the same time last year. But that’s still not much, Lee said. “The equipment and hardware are there, so we’ll see companies deploy private networks on LTE,” he said. “For 5G, the device ecosystem is still lagging behind.”
While 5G certainly offers better security and latency than WiFi, Lee says it won’t replace WiFi for most businesses. “You’re going to deploy private networks where you need throughput and latency, or you’re going to connect a million endpoints on a factory floor,” he says. “I don’t see the need to connect the finance department.”
