In neutral-host private networks, testing and integration are particularly important
There are a number of network testing challenges that are evident at the halfway point of the 5G era—most prominently, Fixed Wireless Access (read more here), the nascent integration of Non-Terrestrial Networks, and the increasing adoption and scale of private networks.
While 5G was fundamentally designed with enterprise uses in mind, that aspect of the technology is only starting to take off. According to Dell’Oro Group, private wireless RAN revenues grew more than 40% last year.
“Private wireless is currently one of the more exciting RAN segments, partly because of the more favorable growth trajectory compared to the broader RAN market,” said Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro. “While it is still early in the private 5G journey, and it will take some time before enterprise spending will move the larger RAN needle, initial readings suggest private wireless moved above the noise in 2024, representing around 3 to 5 percent of total RAN.”
Omdia recently called private networks the “key enterprise 5G monetization opportunity” and identified Nokia, ZTE, and Ericsson as the top three leaders in the market. “Vendors now recognize that private networks are highly specialized and require a few focused partners – not a wide distribution channel – to drive market growth,” Omdia concluded.
Meanwhile, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said during a recent JP Morgan investor conference that the company was seeing “way better” demand for private networks. Verizon, he continued, has seen an increasing funnel of private networks for several years now, across various industries and use cases, from capacity and security to low-latency.
“As soon as you get in a private 5G network, then usually, the CIO or the head of IT of the company starts seeing a lot of new opportunities [on] how to use it,” Vestberg said. “They are fairly small, the first private 5G networks that you sell. It’s like a Wi-Fi network. But over time, they are growing.”
Customers usually start with one site and if it is successful, take it to all their sites. “We are in that scaling right now,” he concluded.
Saurav Jah, president and CEO of Simnovus, said during the recent Test and Measurement Forum event that as 5G private network demand picks up, there is also growing demand for multi-tenant, neutral-host-based private networks—which bring some additional complexity in terms of integration and validation.
“When we deal with such a complex network setup, we have to make sure that first of all, we all are aware of the end customer’s expectations in terms of how do they want to be isolated? Every tenant wants to be isolated,” he said. But their expectations for network characteristics like guaranteed data rates and latency may be quite different, while demanding both seamless coverage and mobility across the covered spaces. Each of those aspects poses a challenge for testing and assuring the individual tenants’ networks.
“We need to ensure that there are no traffic leakages across tenants, and also at the same time, ensure that there is a fair allocation and distribution of resources, radio resources or compute resources across each tenant,” Jah said.
In particular, integration is a major area of focus. These networks typically have to be integrated on one side with an external carrier network, and internally with a company’s IT infrastructure, Jah explained. “The complexity mainly comes from the fact that there are external networks involved, which needs a smooth integration with the private network setup that you’re creating, as well as the integration with the IT network of that enterprise,” Jah added.
That level of integration means not only having a good understanding of the on-site network deployment, but working closely across the various vendors, end-users and carriers involved. “There’s an end-to-end orchestration of the entire infrastructure, I would say, where there are several players involved—but they have to work in conjunction and in collaboration,” Jah said.
There are different architectures that can come into play, some of which may look like a traditional Distributed Antenna System deployment, explains Shirish Nagaraj, SVP of global R&D for Airspan Networks, but with “a parallel layer of private networks that is … layered on top.”
In that case, he said, it’s important to keep the baseband separate and only share infrastructure, so that there aren’t issues with co-mingled network services. He mentioned that in some cases, that type of deployment is also shifting toward an Open RAN—which brings its own testing issues.
The other predominant architecture that Airspan sees is one in which multiple tenants share infrastructure but have separate network cores—either multiple carrier cores, or a carrier core and a private network core, Nagaraj said.
However, regardless of the details of how the infrastructure or spectrum are shared, several aspects are important: Both the fairness that Jah mentioned, and making the deployment an easy one for the enterprise.
“As you go towards private networks, being enterprise friendly is kind of really critical,” said Nagaraj. He said that means having easy deployment mechanisms, providing data localization and security, and guarantees around performance metrics like coverage, mobility and latency.
“At the end of the day, the enterprise doesn’t want to have to deal with the complexities of a typical telecom or a 3GPP-style network deployment,” Nagaraj said. “We truly believe that if we can tie this all together with a very simplified managed service with a management plane and offering the right levels of visibility and controllability of the network, that I think is really the key as you go towards managing these hybrid networks of the future.”
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