Twelve months ago, Frost & Sullivan made the case for why private 5G networks could be a game-changer for some businesses. Troy Morley, an industry principal at his consulting firm, believes that private 5G networks will evolve over the next decade to support the needs of small and medium-sized businesses in nearly every industry.
What makes a private 5G network the right choice for your business?
Installing a private 5G network can address a range of pain points that businesses may face. The first is network coverage. Cellular base stations in public mobile networks are primarily located based on demand. For example, in populated urban areas or along transportation routes.
And this arrangement is good for companies based in metropolitan areas or near highways. But what if a company has business interests in remote locations and needs to connect locally and to its headquarters? Extreme examples include underground operations such as mining, and offshore activities. Masu.
Telecommunications trends: 5G antennas are being installed on buildings in South Korea. Image credit: Ericsson.
Additionally, businesses located near public masts may have good coverage outdoors but experience dead spots when trying to use cellular networks indoors. Morley notes that factories and warehouses can have problems in the area, and the buildings and their contents can be a potential source of signal interference.
Given these network coverage concerns, it’s easy to see why mining, energy, and manufacturing industries are among the early adopters of private 5G networks. Data security must also be considered. This is another reason why businesses choose private setups rather than building solutions using public mobile network infrastructure.
Improved 5G performance
5G enables your devices to deliver faster download speeds and low-latency performance. And high-definition video and mobile gaming are often touted as reasons why mobile customers are ditching their old smartphones and buying new 5G devices. But this just scratches the surface.
“While most consumers think 5G is all about them, the truth is that 5G is ideal for meeting the networking needs of businesses and enterprises,” Morley wrote.
For example, 5G brings important edge capabilities. Private 5G networks not only connect staff, but also enable industrial IoT communications. Wireless networks also offer flexibility that increases business agility and configurability. This means it’s easy to reconfigure tools and teams for different projects.
Cellnex’s Catherine Gull lists automation, worker safety, and situational awareness as the top three benefits that private networks bring to operations. Companies can use her 5G systems to automate indoors and outdoors, from self-driving cars to factory robots.
“They’re doing it to increase safety, and they’re doing it to increase trust,” she told UPTIME participants in June 2023. “The more you put these robots in one space, the more other connection mechanisms become dysfunctional and unreliable” or unsafe. ”
Gull contends that systems such as private 5G networks can provide reliable bandwidth for users and for businesses “where they need it, when they want it, and how they want it.” Additionally, businesses will no longer resist the downsides of conducting business based on public mobile networks.
Laying the path to 5G-based industry! Partnering with Hungary’s EWG Intermodal Terminal #Huawei Develop a strong private life #5G A network to manage cargo, automated cranes and staff management will completely change the way the rail industry is safe and efficient. pic.twitter.com/k0rh0JGm1b
— Huawei (@Huawei) July 26, 2023
In addition to the appeal of complete control, enterprises may find that they can stack multiple use cases on their private 5G networks. Beyond automation, the system can track assets, assist with training, streamline maintenance, provide ERP integration, and more, and can also offer several additional applications.
Once businesses have access to the high bandwidth that 5G provides, there’s a lot they can do. Low latency (and video over wireless) also opens the door to precise remote control, making it broadly appealing to a wide range of industries, from logistics to healthcare.
“Most companies start with what’s really important to them, and that’s often connectivity availability,” Gall points out. “And once that’s resolved, we can move forward on that basis.”Spain-based Cellnex has more than 138,000 mobile network operators (MNOs) deploying their infrastructure. owns a website. And we have cell towers in 12 countries.
What kind of private 5G network architecture do I need?
Multiple antennas associated with 5G infrastructure enable powerful beamforming capabilities. Signals from multiple 5G radios can be intentionally overlaid and grouped together. You can also direct areas of constructive interference within the radiation to your device by adjusting the phase of each broadcast.
As the name suggests, mobile networks are great for staying connected while on the move, and beamforming makes the technology even more precise. Beamforming methods allow you to adjust the signal to follow the device. Buildings can also be used as reflective surfaces to reflect mobile signals back to the receiver.
One of the trade-offs of using much higher frequencies, which provide more bandwidth, is that mobile signals at these shorter wavelengths don’t travel as far. However, beamforming has been shown to compensate for this and make properly configured 5G systems comparable to longer wavelength 4G networks, at least in terms of coverage at the lower end of the 5G spectrum.
Technically, using 3GPP (Mobile Broadband Standards Group) terminology, private 5G networks are referred to as “5G non-public networks”, emphasizing the absence of commercial MNO subscribers. And, as mentioned above, such networks could provide industrial control or replace corporate Wi-Fi.
Wireless access requires physical hardware, but core network elements are virtualized and made available in the cloud. And going back to the security benefits for businesses operating private 5G networks, enterprise systems are visible only to authorized user equipment.
Devices belonging to a 5G non-public network look for a standalone non-public network (SNPN) ID. In contrast, consumer devices access mobile services based on a Public Land Mobile Number (PLMN) ID, which is a combination of the cell phone’s country code and mobile network code. PLMN ID is one of the details included in the handset’s SIM.
Private 5G Network Starter Kit
AWS is looking to close the knowledge gap for business users looking to experiment with private 5G services. The cloud giant offers kits that are priced based on network traffic rather than the number of connected devices. Also, based on AWS demo videos, the setup process is easy and comparable to configuring a Wi-Fi network.
Taking a kit-based first step gives companies the opportunity to run small-scale pilot programs before making larger investments in mobile infrastructure. And his AWS isn’t the only vendor offering easy-to-use solutions. Firecell’s Orion Private 5G dashboard requires no knowledge of 5G network architecture and configuration.
And the French company, which aims to democratize private networks and believes in open source as an advancement in telecommunications, has shipped rack servers, access points, 10 preconfigured SIM cards, and one omnidirectional antenna. You can offer it to your customers to see how your private network works. 5G networks can improve enterprise performance.
If the idea of a private 5G network sounds appealing and you want to crunch the numbers to see if it’s a worthwhile investment for your organization, Nokia has made available its 5G Business Modeling Tool. This web application allows users to compare the total cost of ownership of her Wi-Fi and 5G wireless and is based on over 220 customer use cases.
Returning to Frost & Sullivan’s observation at the beginning of the story, enterprises could end up being the big winners in 5G, as carriers show a strong willingness to customize their solutions to industrial customers. be.
“Communications service providers (CSPs) are making significant investments in 5G,” Morley emphasizes. “The hard truth is that CSPs that rely solely on the consumer market for return on investment will fail.”
