Q&A with Chris Upstone, Director of Private and Public Networks, BAI Communications
Private 5G networks are rapidly moving from experiment to expectation across Australian industry. As deployments grow in scale and complexity, the questions businesses face are shifting from whether to invest to who can actually deliver. Chris Upstone, Director of Public and Private Networks at BAI Communications, discusses what that transition looks like from the front line.
What’s driving private network demand across Australia’s mining, rail and energy sectors, and what does that mean for how the market is maturing?
Australia’s major industrial sectors have always operated at the edge – remote locations, harsh conditions, zero tolerance for communications failure. What has changed is the technology agenda sitting on top of that. Autonomous equipment, real-time operational data, streaming video, integrated IT and OT environments cannot be supported at scale on Wi-Fi or public mobile networks alone. Private 5G networks give operators the performance, security and control they need to run these environments on their own terms.
What we are seeing now is a market that has moved past proof of concept. The early adopters demonstrated the value, and the rest of the industry has taken notice. Decisions that were once exploratory are now strategic. Customers come to us with a clearer brief than they did two or three years ago. They know what they need, they understand the technology options, and they want a partner who can deliver end to end.
BAI operates across both public safety and private industrial networks, which is an unusual combination. What does that dual capability mean in practice for your customers?
Most private network providers come from either the enterprise IT world or the telco world. BAI sits in a different position. We have been designing, deploying and operating mission critical communications infrastructure for government and emergency services for many years. The NSW Public Safety Network connects more than 50 government agencies and 75,000 emergency service terminals across 540,000 square kilometres, and we manage it every day. Earlier this month, that work was recognised as Best Mobile Infrastructure Provider at the 2026 Communications Day Edison Awards.
That experience shapes how we approach industrial private networks. When you have maintained 99.999%, ‘the five nines’, availability through the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and Tropical Cyclone Alfred, you develop a specific understanding of what resilience requires in the field. Our industrial customers benefit from that directly – the same discipline, the same operational rigour, applied to their environments. They are with a partner who has already solved hard problems at scale, in unforgiving conditions.
Spectrum is often cited as a barrier to private network deployment in Australia. How do you tackle this?
Spectrum is genuinely complex in Australia, and it stops a lot of projects before they start. Acquiring the right spectrum for the right geography takes time, regulatory knowledge and, at times, capital. Many organisations do not have any of those in-house.
BAI holds ACMA-licensed spectrum in major metropolitan and regional centres around the country. When a customer comes to us with a private network requirement, we are not starting from scratch. We can move faster, reduce risk, and structure arrangements that work commercially for the customer rather than requiring them to take on spectrum obligations they are not equipped to manage. For industries operating in remote areas, that foundation makes a practical difference from day one.
Industries like mining, rail and energy often operate in the most remote or difficult environments. What’s required to deliver and sustain private networks in those conditions?
The engineering has to be right from the start. That means network design built for the physical environment, whether an underground mine, a heavy-haul rail corridor or an offshore gas facility, and the application layer running on top of it. It means staging and configuration done properly before anything goes to site. And it means a support model that does not rely on getting someone on a plane every time something needs attention. We have purpose-built staging and configuration facilities and a 24/7 Network Operations Centre that monitors and manages live networks. In remote environments, that ongoing operational capability is often what determines whether a private network delivers on its promise or becomes an expensive liability.
There’s a lot of discussion in the industry about managed services versus build-and own models. Where does BAI land on that, and how are customer preferences evolving?
There is no single right model, and customers are becoming more sophisticated about that. Some organisations want to own their infrastructure and have the internal capability to run it. Others want connectivity as an outcome, not a capital project. We can work with either.
What we are seeing shift is the conversation around risk. More customers are asking who carries the operational responsibility once the network is live. Building a private network is one thing but keeping it performing at the levels that mining, rail and energy operations demand is another. That is where a managed services model, or a network as a service arrangement where BAI owns and operates the infrastructure, makes more sense. We are structured to support the model that suits the customer, not the one that suits us.
Where do you see the private 5G network market in Australia heading over the next two to three years, and what does BAI’s ambition look like in that context?
The pipeline is real and growing. As industries accelerate their digital transformations and actively embrace automation and AI across their business, having secure, reliable and scalable communications networks becomes ever more important. Our ambition is to be the partner Australian industry turns to when the communications environment is business and or life critical. We have earned the trust of our customers and partners already and we want to keep earning that position.
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