BARCELONA- For the last couple of years, private 5G discussions have been dominated by concerns over technological and operational complexities. The issue arises from additional physical footprint, unfamiliar gears, specialized RF designs,— and an operational model so different that it has caused many to back away even before deployment began. Now at the cusp of becoming a mainstream alternative to wired connections in industrial-grade communications, with a market potential even bigger than private LTE, private 5G needs a model akin to Wi-Fi: simple and easy to deploy.
Stephen Leotis, president and co-founder of Moso Networks, who is on a mission to make the tech easily accessible in its natural markets, founded Moso Networks — formerly MosoLabs — with this goal.
“We started this company because we saw this problem where private 5G is too complicated. We needed to make it a lot simpler, and we had all the tools in our toolkit in terms of technology, and we wanted to put it all together so that we make enterprises of all sizes capable of bringing 5G into their business today to solve real business problems,” Leotis said.
For the last three years, Moso has been working hand-in-hand with system integrators, managed service providers, and operators to that end, and its effort has paid off. “The really cool thing we’re seeing recently is this shift from thinking about 5G as this kind of scary technology into understanding what it can do, that it is accessible, and then figuring out how do I bring it into the infrastructure that I already have as either a replacement for something that hasn’t worked very well, or augmenting what I already have,” he told.
Production-grade deployments have picked up in the last year, and that has created room for new players, making private 5G an increasingly crowded market where startups and established cellular providers are competing to make a mark. In such a competitive ecosystem, it is imperative to establish individual distinction.
Moso is doing so by simplifying the stack from ground up. “With that shift that I mentioned on the enterprise, how they’re thinking about [private 5G], how they’re looking at cost, we’re really well-positioned going into 2026 for a couple of reasons,” Leotis said.
He explained that on the product side, Moso’s decade-long partnership with Qualcomm allows it to bring the latest SoC-based radios to the customers that are surprisingly simple to set up.
“We call them all-in-one radios. They’re very similar to Wi-Fi access points in their deployment. You can just plug in an Ethernet cable, connect it back into your LAN system, and you can have this connectivity up and running very, very quickly.”
Moso has also invested in the software layer to enable the same level of ease of use. Its software management platform — Intelligent Management Platform or IMP — presents a host of lifecycle controls that allow teams to monitor uptime, perform triage, and enforce security, and meet SLAs confidently.
Moso believes in a “better together” approach when it comes to other vendors in the ecosystem. The company collaborates with multiple industry partners for building complete solutions using diverse technologies that integrate with its own.
“If you take one of our partners, Druid, for example, they have a fantastic core, and they have a lot of experience in the space, and they’ve been around for over 20 years. And so we have really close integration with them. So a customer that wants to use that core we have pre-integrated, we can get that customer up and running in a matter of an hour or two, generally, from zero to connecting clients.”
Asked where Leotis sees the next wave of growth happening, he responded, “We’re seeing explosive growth across many verticals such as the utility and logistics spaces, and doing work in education, campus coverage, events. Our products work within all of these different verticals.”
Particularly, he sees private 5G’s playing an outsize role in powering edge AI. With its ability to support heavy performance demands such as low latency, high throughput, and high connection density, the technology has stirred strong interest in edge sectors like agriculture, aviation, construction, manufacturing, mining, and military where AI workloads are on the rise.
“We’ve heard a lot about and talked a lot about this idea that edge AI is fantastic, but you need this infrastructure, this fabric of connectivity. And that’s what 5G is going to bring for all these edge AI applications, whether it’s in manufacturing, where you need low latency, high performance connectivity, or logistics where you have high mobility.”
“We’re even doing some things around LiDAR, which has really high bandwidth requirements and super low-latency dependencies that need to get back to some edge AI computers. So I think as we see edge AI adoption across all kinds of applications. Private 5G will power all of this connectivity,” he added.
Leotis ended the conversation with an interesting trivia about the company name. He revealed that the name “Moso” is inspired by the mōsō bamboo tree that is native to China and Taiwan.
“[Bamboo] is the fastest growing plant on Earth. It can grow up to a meter a day…But what really connects it in bamboo forests is they’re all connected through this complex underground system of stems that share nutrients and really act as a single big organism,” that resonates with 5G networks’ underlying architecture of cables, connections, and interdependencies.
