Many IoT devices will remain on-premise for all of their working lives, either fixed in-position or else in perpetual motion within a clearly-defined local perimeter line. But many others will move freely in and out of enterprise venues, leaving their local private network boundaries to roam into the wild on carrier-owned public networks – and eventually back again, reattaching to their original enterprise infrastructure. Such seamless mobility requires a hybrid private/public network arrangement to ensure constant national and international connectivity for IoT devices.
But what is a hybrid private network? Unlike a standalone (private-) private network in the original sense, isolated from traditional public mobile infrastructure, a hybrid setup enables IoT devices to go both ways in and out of private/public cellular whilst also retaining secure private access to a centralised cloud (or local edge-cloud) hosted IoT software application. Private 4G and 5G networks have developed around the concept of independent enterprise-owned ‘islands’ of local-area (LAN) connectivity, much like with traditional wireless LAN infrastructure.
But the whole concept of IoT goes way beyond the confines of local-area asset monitoring, as served by such island networks. It stretches out to cover global tracking, so sensors can transmit data via the cloud from field-based assets anywhere in the world, in-situ or in-motion – straight back to HQ, where their condition and progress can be analysed and operationalised. Hybrid networks combine the total control of private cellular with the total availability of public cellular. They enable enterprises to get the best of both worlds, without compromising security, privacy, or control.
The perception, until now, has been that Industry 4.0 wants to retain all its data on-site; that Industry 4.0 only wants isolated ‘island’ networks. This may be the case with certain mission-critical operational processes. But many more IoT applications within Industry 4.0 campuses are non-critical. And the truth is also that cloud security is good, anyway, and increasingly critical-grade – to the extent that industrial enterprises are putting ever-greater trust in cloud-connected operations, especially given their benefits in terms of data processing and business insights.
Hybrid networks bring familiar performance and security capabilities to IoT assets that need to be tracked outside of privately-controlled 4G and 5G setups. Use cases are numerous and varied, and relevant to most enterprise sectors. But the Industry 4.0 market is the most relevant. Manufacturing and logistics are leading the new private-networks charge, according to GSA numbers; manufacturing is the single biggest sector for private 4G/5G deployments, and warehouses and ports, joining the dots in the supply chain, have great appetite to digitise their operations.
These sectors, like others, will make urgent use of hybrid private networks. US-based carrier services company Syniverse, also offering global virtual-network (MVNO) roaming for IoT services, says supply-chain use cases are the logical fit for hybrid IoT networking. It cites tracking of raw materials on macro networks into private networks at production sites, and tracking of finished goods out of manufacturing facilities on public carrier-owned networks, and into private networks again at distribution centres. The transport goes both ways, and the cycle repeats.
Kathiravan Kandasamy, vice president of product management at Syniverse, says: “Digital transformation does not stop at the factory gates; the benefits of private networks should not falter when assets hit the road. Enterprises need continuity of service across their supply chains, and they need an easy way to achieve it. Hybrid private networks afford them a single IoT eSIM, from a single provider, to connect their assets across their private island networks, and into the global distribution network – without compromising performance or security.”
The Syniverse proposition does away with the requirement for enterprises to strike multiple roaming agreements with national carriers; it provides a global IoT SIM that works in 200-plus markets. It has also developed a hybrid network mechanic that enables an IoT device, registered originally on a private enterprise network, to attach to its carrier partners when it leaves the enterprise premises and, crucially, to scan for its home network on-return. Its IoT management platform lets enterprises select performance criteria around coverage, latency, and cost in macro networks.
Kandasamy comments: “Digital transformation of the global economy will be delivered on hybrid public/private infrastructure. While both public networks and private networks will cater to certain important Industry 4.0 use cases, there will be a rapid convergence with 4G and 5G of these two infrastructure types, and enterprises will increasingly take advantage of seamless roaming to connect supply-chain assets as they go from source to production to distribution to final retail and usage. In the end, hybrid private 4G and 5G networks are the springboard for industrial revolution.”
