Simplifying Enterprise 5G: Making Waves As Private Networking Goes Wireless

Of all the recent digital innovations, 5G networks have the greatest potential to revolutionize the world of technology for both organizations and consumers alike. The fifth-generation wireless technology enables ultra-reliable, high-speed, low-latency, power-efficient, high-density wireless connectivity, helping spur a variety of innovations. Enterprises are now increasingly turning to 5G, but instead of using the public 5G networks, more organizations today are opting for their own private 5G network.

Much like 5G in general, private 5G is only recently beginning to pick up steam globally but has rapidly grown since the interest in the technology began. The global private 5G network market size is estimated to reach USD 14.28 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 39.7 percent between now and then. On top of this, Deloitte predicts that over the next decade hundreds of thousands of companies will deploy private 5G networks.

The reason for this swift growth, especially among businesses, is that, unlike general-purpose public networks, private 5G networks are designed with a specific purpose, enabling enterprises to be in control of their destiny in terms of partners, features, and connectivity. This helps enterprises venture into low-latency use cases such as IoT, AR/VR, and robotics, with complete control over data, security, and networks.

“While many aspects of an enterprise can be enhanced when a private 5G network is leveraged, one area of a business, in particular, that benefits greatly from private 5G is the IT department,” said Roy Timor-Rousso, Chief Revenue Officer, Pente Networks, a company that provides an operating system for wireless enterprise applications. “Depending on how a private 5G network is built and managed, the technology can help simplify an IT team’s daily processes. IT teams are constantly under pressure to deliver faster and more reliable connectivity while staying within their budgets – and the only way to do so is to move away from the wires and move up into cloud-telco types of solutions – software defined and incredibly powerful, indoors and outdoors, supporting everything from real-time communications to IoT applications.”

Timor-Rousso explained that private 5G offers IT teams, all the capabilities of wired connections, without the cost and headaches associated with wires. “With private 5G, enterprises can connect controllers, switches, sensors, and actuators at latency and reliability levels equivalent to those of a wired connection. This saves money for enterprises, allowing them to get rid of a good partition of wires, also removing the hassle from the average day for an IT team.”

Private 5G networks also offer enhanced resiliency, offering a 99.9999 percent reliability rate when it comes to expected downtime. This rate, also known as “six nines” reliability, implies expected downtime of a mere five minutes per year, equivalent to the performance of fixed Ethernet networks. This greatly reduces the work IT teams must do, as they don’t have to worry about network crashes as much as they would without private 5G.

“Private 5G also comes with an increased range of connectivity, being able to seamlessly connect multiple environments, and this helps enhance IT team capabilities,” Timor-Rousso said. “This can be especially crucial in industries such as manufacturing plants, logistics centers, ports, large campuses, transportation hubs, with many more use cases as well.”

A lot of preparation goes into deploying a private 5G network, and enterprises need to make sure they’re doing their due diligence before attempting to adopt and leverage a network on their own.

Deploying a network takes a good deal of technological know-how, and according to Nokia research, while 83 percent of enterprises surveyed want to use 5G, 30 percent report they want to understand 5G better before developing a deployment plan for their organization.

When it comes to deploying a private 5G network, not only is choosing the right architecture crucial but so is choosing the right partner.

Due to the complexity of refactoring older applications and the lack of institutional knowledge in developing 5G-enabled next-gen applications, 38 percent of the CIOs surveyed already prefer outsourcing 5G deployment to a managed service provider or system integrator.

“Private 5G is more than an emerging trend, and its capabilities will allow an enterprise to drive innovation to unprecedented levels,” Timor-Rousso explained. “With a private 5G network, IT teams will be able to offer more, with enhanced capabilities and simplified work thanks to the new network technology. When 5G speaks IT, and when managing a 5G network is easier than managing legacy networks – and cost less – IT teams are heroes!”

Originally published on 5G Evolution World