Industrial giants and telecom vendors are pushing hard on private 5G – Siemens has expanded globally into North America, Nokia is continuing to land mission-critical enterprise deals, and a new UK open RAN push shows how private networks are becoming central to both industrial strategy and telecoms supply chain diversification.
In sum – what to know:
Siemens twists – German firm has expanded its private 5G offer into Europe and North America, presenting enterprise-controlled 5G as a pillar for AI-driven industrial automation.
Nokia holds – Finnish outfit has secured a major Canadian mining deployment, underlining continued demand for private LTE/5G despite uncertainty around its enterprise strategy.
Britain waits – Government scheme to promote open RAN to diversify telecoms supply chains has roped in six private 5G specialists, mostly from Europe; a strong enterprise focus is clear.
1 | Siemens – coming to America
Siemens has gone global with its private 5G offer. The juggernaut German industrial vendor has added eight new countries to its private 5G sales operation, and declared 5G – industrial-grade, deployed on enterprise premises, using private spectrum – as “one of the essential key pillars connecting AI‑driven manufacturing”. It has just added Belgium, Finland, France, Norway, Poland, and the UK to its European roster, plus Canada as its debut market in North America. The US will follow in the summer (2026), it has said.
The firm is positive about the technology, and its application and appetite among industrial firms – as discussed with RCR at MWC at the start of last month (March). It is gearing up for a “comprehensive industrial connectivity” showcase at Hannover Messe in a couple of weeks (April 20-24), it said, covering its portfolio of wired and wireless networking, switching, routing, and power supply equipment, plus network management and cybersecurity. It has two new Siemens-made radio (RAN) units, for the 3.8-4.2 GHz band and the US-specific CBRS band, respectively.
The latter is brand new. Including the US, Siemens is now selling its private 5G system (as part of its Xcelerator portfolio) in 15 countries with dedicated spectrum available for local enterprise usage; it has been variously supplying to Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland for some time. It is pitching to manufacturing companies, mostly – in both process and discrete production. It has listed food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, intralogistics, heavy industries, and crane operations as target sub-sectors.
At MWC, Siemens discussed its work with steel makers, car makers, and shipping ports in Europe, often pegged to automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots (AGV and AMRs) for purposes of mobility, latency, and control. It has also seen rising demand from crane manufacturers, bundling 5G to support fleet automation. Besides, the firm has upgraded its 5G routers with edge runtime capabilities so industrial applications run directly on devices – eliminating the need for additional hardware, facilitating “AI-ready data processing” directly on the ‘shop’ floor.
It restated the original private 5G promise about enterprise-owned wireless infrastructure offering deterministic performance, unadulterated by general-purpose office comms – running “on their own premises, fully independently”. It said: “Siemens developed its private 5G infrastructure with industrial use cases, operational requirements, OT cybersecurity, and end users in mind. The result is a rugged, industry-native end-to-end solution for independent, on-prem wireless network operation – without relying on third-party providers or mobile network operators.”
Unlicensed Wi-Fi is “prone to overloading in dense industrial environments”, and can “no longer keep pace”, it said. Siemens is a major industrial Wi-Fi (WLAN) provider, it might be noted. Its 5G updates “respond to a growing connectivity challenge at the heart of modern manufacturing”, it said. Its system supports key OT automation protocols, such as PROFIBUS and PROFINET (plus the over-the-top PROFIsafe software layer for functional machine safety); it has been certified by the German technical inspection group TÜV.
It also supports adjustable upload and download capacities (TDD patterns); configuration requires setting 20-odd variables in a web dashboard – “designed for use by even non-IT personnel”, it said – and integrates precisely with its own IT/OT “landscape”, as unified in the Xcelerator platform. A feature of the discussion at MWC was how Siemens is also going via internal channels with its private 5G offer, already selling its automation hardware and software to familiar industrial customers. Which is a point of difference with most others in the space.
RCR will keep tabs on further channel announcements, however – notably in the US market. Siemens called it a “solution built from (by?) industry, for industry”, and spelled out how it sits with the rest of its industrial networking pitch: managed and unmanaged switches to bridge production cells and network layers; industrial power supplies for critical comms and automation infrastructure; zero-trust network management and diagnostics software; digital twins for OT networks; full-stack OT security solutions.
Axel Lorenz, chief executive for process automation at Siemens, commented: “The industrial world deserves a 5G solution that speaks its language. With our private 5G infrastructure soon available in the US, we are giving manufacturers the tools to build their own reliable, secure digital backbone – on their terms, on their premises and fully under their control.”
2 | Nokia – still the gold standard
There is some intrigue, perhaps, in a fairly straightforward press notice about a Nokia win at a gold mine in Canada. First the detail: Canadian-based system integrator Ambra Solutions, forever in the private networks market, has deployed a private 4G/5G network from Nokia for IAMGold Corporation (formerly the International African Mining Gold Corporation) at its Côté Gold mine, located between Timmins and Sudbury in northern Ontario. It has replaced legacy Wi-Fi systems (“limited in reliability and mobility”) to automate the firm’s vehicle fleet, including for remote operation, and optimize operational decision-making and enhance worker safety.
The new setup supports autonomous haul trucks and drills, alongside other comms and operational use cases. Ambra Solutions has delivered lots of these systems, variously for mining companies, oil and gas producers, utility firms, and other enterprises in other verticals. It has a historical private LTE (4G) deployment at the LaRonde gold mine complex in Quebec, owned by Agnico Eagle Mines. It works also with Ericsson (such as at LaRonde) and Huawei, plus the likes of Athonet/HPE and Airspan. It owns spectrum in the 850 MHz band, and works with CBRS in the US, and makes arrangements variously with other spectrum holders besides.
The deployment is geared to scale as the mine grows – presumably also from 4G to 5G. IAMGold wanted “pervasive coverage across the mine, above and below ground”, and “minimal infrastructure requirements to support current automation needs [and] future expansion”. Ambra Solutions said its solution is “built using” Nokia’s Modular Private Wireless (MPW) solution – which is where the slight intrigue is, of course. Because, per the MPW link here (provided in the press note by Ambra), MPW is a part of Nokia’s enterprise campus edge (ECE) unit, bundled into a group called ‘portfolio businesses’ at the end of last year (2025), and put up for sale. RCR has written lots about this.
MPW is the big-sized version of Nokia’s seminal Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) product, designed generally for wider-area deployments (versus self-contained campus projects) – such as at mines, plus some utility environments, railway locations, bigger ports, and so on. Basically, it is the ECE division’s macro-style private network solution for smaller-than traditional public 4G/5G setups, and it crosses over somewhat with the kinds of ‘mission-critical’ enterprise setups that Nokia will continue to serve, post-sale, via its core Mobile Infrastructure division. Nokia will continue to sell MPW for wide-area deployments on a license to ECE, when ECE is under new stewardship.
It may do the same with ECE, for major enterprise campus bundles. The businesses are forever entangled, of course; MPW, like DAC, contains certain Nokia-owned modules in its packet core Compact Mobility Unit (CMU) solution, part of its private core network proposition – handling subscriber management, session management, routing traffic. So there will be a license fee going the other way, too – for whoever buys the ECE business, as the leading provider in the private networks space. Which presumably complicates its sale in the meantime.
But the point, here, is just that Ambra Solutions is a long-time ECE partner, and IAMGold is a new ECE (vendor) win. And the sense is, actually, that Nokia ECE is still winning business in the market. How much – versus its monopolisation of the sector’s salad days – remains to be seen.
Matthew Young, head of mission critical enterprise for Nokia in North America, said: “Our new telecoms infrastructure provides IAMGOLD with comprehensive, automated connectivity to deliver on the company’s digital transformation goals and maximize efficiency through autonomous operations.” Note: Young is quoted in another Nokia-related release, from yesterday, about a tie-up with US indoor CBRS connectivity provider InfiniG, which is interesting in view of the anti-CBRS movement among operators in the US. More tomorrow; which might give more clues about Nokia’s enterprise strategy as well.
Éric L’Heureux, founder and chief executive at Ambra Solutions, said: “Our mission is to contribute to a safer and smarter mining industry through reliable and optimal private LTE/5G connectivity solutions, and the Côté Gold project reflects this vision.”
3 | Various – open and private RAN
Related, and because good things come in threes: there is a distinctive private-networks angle to a new UK open RAN scheme, about opening telecoms supply chains for critical infrastructure, whether owned by mobile operators or private enterprises. Government-backed innovation agency Digital Catapult has added six new vendors to its open RAN programme, geared for “building resilience in the UK’s advanced connectivity infrastructure and supply chains”.
It might be noted, as an aside, that Virgin Mobile O2’s announcement yesterday that it would continue with Ericsson and Nokia for its public 5G SA works, the same as its (Cornerstone) network-sharing partner VodafoneThree, rather muddies the open RAN message for small vendors in big networks. But the technology is still good for enterprises to run private networks, of course. And all of Digital Catapult’s new open RAN partners have at least some focus here.
The six are: Belgian private 5G RAN firm Accelleran (merging with core provider Firecell as a full-stack provider); UK-based in-building neutral host provider Antevia Networks; Irish RAN provider Benetel, working with operators and enterprises; HTC-owned private 5G RAN “pioneer” G REIGNS; Polish private-network and neutral-host RAN provider IS-Wireless; and Taiwanese outfit Pegatron, once part of Asus, which also sells private 5G RAN systems.
Digital Catapult said it is actively supporting UK mobile operators (MNOs) by “broadening access to a pipeline of new suppliers” to scale deployment of open RAN systems and to diversify telecoms supply chains. But as above, the move is as much about enterprises. The six vendors will get access to its ‘advanced connectivity lab’, the first and only UK-based ‘open testing and integration centre’ (OTIC), to be “certified and badged post-completion”.
The open RAN test facility (SONIC Labs; SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre) opened in 2021, and has so far tested 71 open RAN products from 26 global vendors. Digital Catapult stated: “It [aims] to drive successful partnerships with MNOs… Participants can receive badges for interoperability and end-to-end testing, critical for instilling confidence among MNOs.” It is also offering support on commercialisation and distribution.
It said: “As these vendors trial their products and services, the future of open RAN looks promising. The collaboration… will pave the way for a more connected and efficient digital ecosystem in the UK… This initiative not only supports the growth of individual companies but also strengthens the overall telecoms infrastructure, benefiting businesses and consumers alike.”
