Private 5G networks are beginning to deliver ‘real business value,’ says AWS exec
Even as private 5G deployments are taking off around the world, from China to Europe, scaling across and managing multiple services and locations remains a challenge. At the Private Networks Forum, panelists discussed how their companies ensure flexibility, visibility and control across and between different services and networks for their enterprise customers, as well as the private network use cases they see gaining the most traction.
But first, what does scaling up mean in the context of private networks? According to Vodafone’s Global Senior Product Manage Elizabeth Rumsey, the carrier — which has deployed more than 100 private networks globally — views scalability as “the opportunity to deploy different private networks … to different sites” and “across different geographies.” Doing so, she continued, enables the customer to take learnings across these different networks and have the same visibility and control as they may have with a fixed wide-area network. “Even if the different networks have different requirements,” she added.
For customers looking to scale private networks across different services and locations, Airbus Defense and Space provides what the company’s Head of Research and Standardization Amina Boubendir called a “catalogue-driven approach” to network management. This approach allows customers to shop around, if you will, for solutions that deliver what each service or network slice may require depending on KPIs. “[This approach] promotes the flexibility that we can have in dealing with different clients… the solution would be transparent for them,” she said. “The scale of private network would vary but the approach that we choose for the management… can still be the same.”
Chis McKenna, the global head of business development for private 5G at Amazon Web Service, provided a real-world example of this catalogue-driven approach, commenting that AWS is often asked if it offers a private 5G neutral host solution. The answer, he continued, is no, but they have partners that do. “We have onboarded them in AWS and our customers are able to choose them and even procure them from AWS… our goal is to make it as easy as possible to consume them,” he said.
McKenna also commented that the way enterprise networks are being deployed is changing as these deployments are beginning to deliver “real business value.”
“More often than not, the point of the deployment is less about the network itself and more about the value it brings,” he shared. “All the industries are moving at a difference pace, but private wireless sits across a massively broad set of industry. Where we’re really seeing the scale coming in is a few horizontal use cases that sit across every vertical. Something like compute division use cases, for example, are just as equally valid in healthcare as they are in sports as they are in security, mining.” Other growing areas of interest include augmented reality, robotics, all of which cut across many industry verticals, he said.
And as these types of applications continue to become more ubiquitous, so too will the need for the lower latency, better security and higher reliability and control that private 5G networks can provide. “We identify the need of a private network as part of the transformation rather it just being about the network itself,” McKenna said.
