While private 5G is poised to deliver major benefits to enterprise users, there are a number of complexities to deploying 5G alongside existing connectivity mediums, including 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi. In the context of private 5G for the shop floor rather than a carpeted office, legacy operational technology equipment isn’t going away anytime soon, meaning there’s an integration lift that comes with private 5G.
According to Sanjay Kumar, Vice President of product management and marketing for Arrcus, this reality requires “a converged solution” to facilitate the co-existence of radio and core network infrastructure. “You need a multi-radio access technology that takes into account 3G/4G systems that might exist along with the 5G radio technologies. And then you need to ensure backwards as well as forwards compatibility.”
To the device piece, he called out the number and variety of internet of things devices that could be present in an enterprise environment. “You need to make sure that there is a device-level compatibility when looking at moving to a private 5G-type of network.” Finally, Kumar noted the importance of considering OSS/BSS integration, as well as service assurance systems. “When it comes to thinking about rolling out private 5G, you need to really think about what technologies exist currently and how you can make them work together so that you can really pave the path forward for moving to a private 5G network.”
Continuing the discussion around device-level considerations, Verizon’s Gary Baker, head of international private 5G networks, honed in on typical IT refresh cycles. “There may be equipment [that’s] 20-years old. So you have to accept that this is almost predominantly going to be a brownfield environment…And that does throw up a number of challenges.”
Baker continued: “It’s not just about what companies have today in terms of their technologies, whether it’s their PLCs, PID controllers, ATVs, etc…But it’s also what’s in the market in terms of these things because they have existing interfaces, there’s existing industry specific protocols that you need to be taken into consideration. And there’s also power. Wireless is great, but at some point these devices have to be powered. So that’s yet another challenge.”
The move from hardware-centric to software-centric networking
5G in its purest form is meant to be a cloud-native, programmable networking technology that brings much more flexibility and responsiveness as compared to previous generations of cellular. Kumar went into the architectural considerations in a move from a hardware-centric to a software-centric networking approach.
“You want to be able to run that on any form factor,” he said. “So for example, you may want to, in your MEC infrastructure, your edge compute resources, you may want to run networking in a switch form factor, top of rack type of a solution or for that matter you may want to run it as a virtual machine on the computer resources themselves. And so you need that flexibility when it comes from a form factor perspective.”
With regard to the considerations raised by a distributed cloud environment, he said, “You’ve got your workloads distributed across this entire spectrum, and this really requires a network that is flexible and can truly unify all of these different elements from the edge to the public, multi-cloud domains. In addition to that, you need a network that can bridge between the mobile world, the IP world, as well as the cloud world.”
What does this technology leap mean for the actual end users within an enterprise organization? Baker said, “Private 5G…changes everything because it’s quite unique and specific to different industry verticals. So you start to look at that ecosystem. That ecosystem may be different in certain manufacturing elements to other industries. I think it’s changing the whole dynamic about it’s no longer a one-size-fits-all. It’s about the telco industry adapting and better understanding and being better integrated with some of its verticalized customers.”
Industry 4.0 and creating trust
Giving summary thoughts, Kumar boiled down private 5G for Industry 4.0 into connectivity, service assurance, security, URLLC and edge computing buckets. “You need to have the ability to connect to public networks” both fixed and mobile. “So there’s likely to be some sort of a hybrid, private and public connectivity. You also need to think about guaranteed service level assurances and being able to deliver that.” Security considerations include DDoS attacks, SIM spoofing, and lawful intercepts among others. URLLC, down to the level of a network slice, will be “an absolutely key tenet” of private 5G. With regard to edge computing, there needs to be a unified management environment and ability to expose that environment to application developers…These are some of the key requirements that I see…as far as Industry 4.0 is concerned.”
Last word to Baker on how to accelerate private 5G adoption. “I think focus on things that matter to customers,” he said. “This is almost creating trust…I’ve seen, been involved in, so many different technologies throughout my career where it is taken a lot longer than anyone expected, and this probably could be no different. So it’s about, I would say, strong focus on where the real gains are rather than trying to be broad and do everything.”
