Verizon Business has swapped Route 66 for the A13, seeking to turn the UK’s industrial corridors into souped-up digital highways for manufacturing and logistics companies. Its new private 5G deal with Thames Freeport looks like a landmark stop – and another junction along its journey at which to fill its tank.
Big wheels, turning – growth of 200% and 100% for private / neutral-host 5G revenue and sales expected in 2025, reckons Verizon Business
Keys to the highway – six-network deal with Thames Freeport spans ports, plants, and logistics, and looks like an important one for the sector
Industry 4.0 ride-share – steady partnership with Nokia, plus liberalised spectrum regimes, appear to underpin the US firm’s international wins
A few leftovers, here, from RCR’s conversation with US-based Verizon Business this week about its latest industrial 5G pitstops – as it further expands a kind of Route 66 road trip (“the highway that’s the best”), connecting American enterprises from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, into a flag-planting overseas victory parade down the A13 ‘trunk-road to the sea’, linking London’s biggest logistics and manufacturing hubs along the Thames Estuary. Of course, its new private 5G deal with Thames Freeport is not its first foreign jaunt; it has been working with Associated British Ports (ABP), also in the UK, since 2021, and is part of the new connectivity engine room at an Audi test-track in Germany.
All of these setups are with Nokia, it might be noted – which appears, at least, like a favourite for non-domestic Industry 4.0 supplies. It has other conquests outside of the US, too. But this multi-site deployment with Thamesport – at the Port of Tilbury (two networks), DP World London Gateway (two more, for the deep-sea port and its logistics hub), and Ford’s Dagenham plant (another); all backed up (a sixth) – looks like the motherlode for private-5G based AI and IoT, in all their hotly-tipped Industry 4.0 glory. It shows either the newfound maturity of a fledgling market, or the sheer boldness of ambition of a progressive enterprise – and probably both. “The vision is huge.”
This is Jennifer Artley, again, in charge of ‘5G acceleration’ at Verizon Business. “It could not be more ambitious – in terms of what the team at Thames Freeport wants to achieve, for both the tenants of the port, and also for the region and the people of the region,” she said this week. It is the kind of statement, a little vague, which makes you believe – that a new industrial revolution is almost possible, so long as stakeholders are on board, and engines are tuned. The Thames Freeport story will be discussed further in these pages – about how the biggest industrial venues along a dirty British A road (“an okay road that’s the best”, per the Bard of Barking) might be souped up by new digital tech.
But for now, the initial applications that go on the new infrastructure, rolling-out through the second half of 2025, are quite familiar: loads of comms, loads of cameras, loads of sensors, lots of talk about AI; mostly in the name of worker safety and efficiency, plus machine automation. All of which Nokia also knows very well by now.
Artley says: “At the moment, it is pretty standard stuff. But the planning has been significant to understand the prospective use cases. And so [Thames Freeport] is very well prepared – not just to deploy the network but to immediately deploy the use cases. They are ready to go, and they want to move fast. They’ve done the prep, and now it’s about the speed.”
Which means we can park the Thames Freeport story (here, momentarily). Because the Verizon Business story – taking prime deals from local rivals, topping weird market reviews – should be heard, again. Because it has its foot on the gas – by its own account. Here’s the key quote, from Artley: “The momentum is tremendous: 2024 over 2023, we grew 350 percent; 2025 over 2024, we hope to grow by more than 200 percent. And that is just a revenue perspective. In terms of total contract value, we will be close to double (plus 100 percent) what we closed last year. And customers, mostly in manufacturing, are signing up for their second, third, fourth, fifth sites.”
She goes on: “And that is really exciting because a lot of it is from word-of-mouth, internally within customers. We are working with a steel manufacturer in the US, for example, and the plant manager [at one site] filmed a video [about private 5G] and distributed it to the managers of all the other plants. These networks are making a real difference, and our customers evangelize about their impact internally – of their own accord.” She goes on to talk about work to swap out “aged” DAS systems for neutral-host 5G systems at “globally-known” hospitals and healthcare groups, but the instruction is to keep the powder dry – for a proper discussion after the summer.
So just put the Thames Freeport deal in some kind of context. Is it the best or biggest or most exciting private 5G deal out there, or which Verizon Business has done? Artley is too careful to rank business. But she notes its scale and scope, and the work of Thames Freeport to organise different stakeholders. She responds: “The transformation that our customers are doing, whether they’re big or small, whether they are in manufacturing or logistics or healthcare – it is all exciting. All of these opportunities, which we are supporting, are transformational for customers – which is what makes them all important to us. But yes, we are extremely proud of this one in particular.”
