As private 5G matures, Ericsson highlights convergence as a key enterprise theme: bringing together dedicated private networks and neutral-host indoor coverage; the firm also pushes back against claims that its telco heritage leaves it out of step with enterprise requirements.
In sum – what to know:
Private and neutral – enterprises increasingly want to solve mission-critical connectivity and indoor coverage in tandem, with Ericsson combining shared/public and private spectrum on shared infrastructure to support both.
Scale differentiator – the firm pushes back on claims its systems are over-engineered, arguing that major works with global enterprises have driven its innovation roadmap, and made its systems uniquely fit-for-purpose.
Group synergies – while small relative to its parent business, private 5G is strategically important to Ericsson, the company says – supported by business acquisitions, channel activities, and core 5G technologies.
Note: this article is continued from a previous post, found here.
We missed a point earlier, when discussing how 5G has kicked open enterprise doors for private cellular, to make it more than just an outdoor coverage solution: the crossover with neutral hosts systems, often riding on the same radio hardware infrastructure as private networks, is clear, reckons Ericsson. This combination presents an opportunity for enterprises to support mission-critical operations with dedicated 5G spectrum and equipment, and also to solve traditional indoor coverage issues for general-purpose office comms.
Picking up the thread again, Manish Tiwari, head of enterprise 5G at the Swedish firm, suggests the “majority” of its private 5G customers “need to solve the indoor coverage problems” at the same time. “The unique thing is we can combine these two things together on the same radio architecture – with our multi-band Radio Dots. We can bring the public spectrum as well as the private spectrum. An operator can manage it as part of their macro network. [That combination] – to deploy different flavours of 5G on the same enterprise – is getting very good traction.”
A “typical customer journey” starts with either one, he says, and frequently vaults to the other as well; the start point likely depends on the enterprise vertical, with hard-nosed Industry 4.0 use cases driving certain segments towards private 5G in the first instance, and white-collared office comms (in “commercial real estate or finance”, say) tending to tee-up an original discussion around neutral-host 5G systems, often attached to CBRS spectrum (in the US). “Those two technologies are adjacent and complementary in terms of customer journeys. We see that consistently.”
But let’s back-up; because the charge laid at Ericsson’s feet, like at Nokia’s, is that it is a legacy telco vendor selling legacy telco products. In other words, its systems tend to be over-sized, over-engineered, and over-expensive for enterprises. To an extent, this is an old argument, from five years ago; both have jettisoned features and shrunk-down their systems. But there is certainly a narrative, peddled by newer names in the private 5G market – mostly core network vendors, often startups – that Ericsson and Nokia are built for different worlds.
What does Ericsson say to that – apart from the discussion already about ‘Frankenstein’ systems (to borrow a term from California-based upstart start-up Celona, which might well make such arguments about Ericsson and Nokia)? Tiwari responds: “The best way to answer that is to look at reference customers and scale deployments. The thing that guides the maturity of a product, and whether it serves the customer, is that it has gone through the rigour of supporting difficult customers and difficult deployments at scale. And that is something that we feel good about.”
He explains: “Think about an auto maker with factories across continents, which produces a vehicle every two minutes and wants the network to run 24/7/365; which can’t afford downtime; which wants complete integration with their policy infrastructure, active directory, firewalls; which requires all-different network behaviours for all-different devices. These are the problems you solve when you deploy at scale. So when people say, ‘hey, these guys come from a telco heritage’, they’re referring to the old says – when integrators cobbled pieces from different vendors.
“Which was an issue in the 4G-era. These enterprises have been very demanding of us; that these systems are mission-critical, and ‘need to work like this’. They are the ones driving our roadmap. Operator networks have a maintenance window for software upgrades; but an enterprise would never accept that. They want resiliency across every layer. If a node fails, another takes over – so the network doesn’t go down. They want handover between networks – so if a device goes from a factory to a warehouse, it doesn’t have to re-authenticate or reattach.”
He adds: “Because that is how Wi-Fi works. They want cellular to work in the same way. So we have implemented all of those features over the last couple of years to make sure 5G behaves exactly as they want. They want policies to be defined and enforced on different facilities. So at this point, that argument is – well, I would put it the other way, and ask these other vendors if they have actually deployed any of this stuff at scale, and whether they have learned from the problems you run into [when making private 5G work for enterprises].”
Tiwari is on a roll, and has more to say. Which is the most important part of private 5G for enterprises: the radio or core network? “Both. You need very solid and mature RAN software – because the unique thing with cellular is the ability to control the RF layer very precisely. Unlike with Wi-Fi, right? When I talked earlier about how different devices expect different behaviours from the network, that functionality is supported in the RAN stack; the same with TSN, URLLC, all of that. And we inherit that maturity from the rest of Ericsson. We don’t have to invest on top
“But the core is critical. When you deploy macro networks, there are large services teams that understand cellular very deeply, and get manually involved. You don’t have that on the enterprise side. Which means you have to abstract and automate the complexity. That’s the work we do. You can tune hundreds of thousands of parameters in a typical radio; but you don’t need all of them for a typical enterprise deployment. And we know from our deployments with customers which 20 or 30 features actually need to be tuned. So that’s the enterprise flavour.”
And in light of Nokia’s about-turn on all of this – certainly on the made-for-enterprise 5G proposition – how is the enterprise wireless team perceived within the bigger Ericsson group, which makes most of its money from selling big box systems to big operator customers? What is the strategic importance of this small and speculative, high-growth and low-margin, innovative kind-of niche private 5G business? Tiwari says: “Well, you have seen the bets Ericsson has made – with the acquisition of Cradlepoint, and then the acquisition of Vonage. So it is committed to enterprises.”
He explains: “With regards to private networks, the business is organised into four large units and one of them is enterprise wireless solutions. We have a slightly different multi-channel go-to market, compared to the core business – selling through IT distributors and resellers, and also through CSPs and global systems integrators. Which is very similar to how Cisco or HPE works, with a two-tier channel and so on – very familiar in the enterprise space. And in terms of access to technology, we benefit hugely from the rest of the group.
“Because the software stack is the same as in the macro network, and has already gone through regress testing at scale – to meet requirements for different spectrum and slicing, and all the different architectures the operators are deploying. So we get access to all the features Ericsson builds in the hardened RAN software stack and core, and then (customise the product for the enterprise market). But if you’re a startup, trying to build that software from scratch, especially if you’re using ODM radios to do it, then it is a very, very difficult thing to do.”
