A panel session at Private Networks Forum in May discussed what 5G delivers for enterprises now and what it promises to deliver in the future, with a keen eye on the applications that will swing the business case for them to invest in all-singing private cellular networks. The session was hosted by RCR Wireless, and attended by a cross section of the private 5G vendor/usermarket, and concluded that the market is being cleaved open by certain gateway applications, supply-side issues are being sorted, demand-side appetites are being sated, and that service models are getting around deep knowledge gaps that will likely always exist between the sides.
The panellists were: Krishna Chirala, director of product management at It networking giant Cisco, which has just launched its private 5G service in earnest, in partnership with global system integrator NTT, among others; Richie Gill, director of product management at IoT MVNO KORE Wireless, which is looking to join-the-dots between public and private 5G infrastructure for supply chain tracking; Aaron Li, 5G market development engineer at test and measurement company Keysight Technologies, which has a new(ish) business division pitched squarely at private 5G network assessment; and importantly, to present the enterprise view, Utku Barış Pazar, chief strategy and digital officer at appliances manufacturer Arçelik Global, which owns the Beko and the Grundig brands, among others.
Here are five killer conclusions from the session; a full recording of the panel, and of the whole event, is available on-demand here.
1 | GATEWAY APPLICATIONS – ONE TO RULE THEM ALL
We should start with the enterprise story; with Turkish manufacturer Arçelik Global, which has deployed a private 5G network from Nokia at a washing machine factory in the north of Istanbul. Utku Barış Pazar, overseeing the deployment, made clear that the business case for Arçelik Global to commission Nokia to deploy a private network hinged on one key anchor application, which in turn hinged on a only couple of network features; that its 5G project was initially green-lit to enable its fleet of autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) to work properly, and that 5G brought the kind of “mobility and reliability” that previous Wi-Fi supported solutions simply could not deliver.
Pazar said: “Of all the features, mobility and reliability are the most important value-adds for 5G. Factories are difficult environments for wireless… [which] was the fundamental reason we wanted to explore [5G]. AGVs take components from the warehouse… [into] the factory for installation and assembly lines, and then [return] them… to specific locations. With Wi-Fi… handover… didn’t function as expected, a lot of time. AGVs were basically unable to move because they [repeatedly] needed to sync-up… We have roughly 40 AGVs, and a significant reduction in handover failures since switching to 5G, plus a 25-30 percent increase in productivity on AGV round-trips. So this is a very solid, tangible use case – which increases operational efficiency of the factory.”
2 | FACTORY SCALABILITY – APPS ON EASY STREET
Sticking with Arçelik Global, Pazar said the Turkish firm had found scaling from a single gateway use-case at a single manufacturing site easy enough. “We have been able to increase coverage and add new use cases relatively quickly, because scaling within a single factory is relatively very straightforward, in my opinion,” he said. Pazar noted Arçelik Global’s work with Nokia to deploy and connect cameras at the site in order to “push the boundaries on employee and health-and-safety with the use of [machine vision solutions]… to respond to situations that might be dangerous for [staff]”. As well, the firm is looking to extend the in-house AGV model to other stock optimisation practices.
“These kinds of things are on the horizon for us – security surveillance and new track-and-trace applications,” said Pazar. At the same time, he warned the challenge to scale private 5G to other venues, especially to venues in other markets, is more difficult, mainly because of spectrum regulation and radios compatibility. He said: “The key here is the frequency. If you don’t have the [spectrum]… then everything else does not matter… We tried to do this before the [vertical/private] 5G frequency [allocation] was finalised in Turkey, and it’s still not done. Because… if the regulation only allows mobile operators to import 5G radio products, then you can’t import them and you cannot own them. Those legislations are the foundation… [to] really reap the benefits of these systems.”
3 | SPIRALLING DEMAND – BOOM-TIME BECKONS
The clearest message from the panel was that a boom-time is coming – if only certain teething issues in the ecosystem could be sorted. In response to a question about pipeline delays in chipsets, devices, and features, and whether these were all a consequence in the end of slow-moving demand from enterprises, Aaron Li at Keysight Technologies exclaimed: “I think everything’s actually progressing fairly well; we see holdups, for sure, but [it is not because of a lack of] demand.” Chipsets, devices, and features are all problems, he acknowledged; but they are also problems that are inevitable, and which will be solved by the ecosystem and not disrupt demand from enterprises.
This demand is growing stronger in manufacturing, noted Pazar at Arçelik Global. Digital transformation is happening with parallel tech in factories anyway, just like in every work space, and demand for “mobility and reliability” is only growing stronger. “Factories are becoming more dynamic. In the past, you designed a factory to stay the same for 10 or 20 years. But we now change the factory every couple of months to increase capacity or introduce new products, and there are new digitalization projects every day. Which increases the demand for reliable coverage… [All the] open space and metalwork [makes] it challenging for Wi-Fi… which is why we started with 5G [in the first place].”
Related; in response to a question about her company’s timing with private 5G, and the charge it is late-to-market, Krishna Chirala at Cisco said demand is bubbling-up nicely, and 2023/24 is when the boom-time breaks. “I don’t believe we are [late]. I think it’s turning out well for us,” she commented, pointing out that Cisco’s work with NTT does not mark the start of its sales push, which has been live for 18 months already (since MWC 2022). “We had an unbelievable number of enquiries… two years back, where salespeople… were pretty much pounding the table, saying, ‘We need the solution now’. Literally hundreds of opportunities were logged… which drove us to kick this off.”
Cisco has since revised and relaunched its private 5G solution, however; it has 20 deployments with 20 enterprises already – “which are phasing out beyond POCs and RFPs into commercial deployments”, said Chirala. She said more: “It’s mostly existing Cisco customers that want to bolt on. The big chunk of this actually lies with customers in the defence sector. Those are the bigger deployments; the rest are mostly in warehouses, venues, factories, as well as a couple in hospitality.” A question about how soon Cisco’s focus moves from large corporations to small- and mid-sized firms occupying the mass market was responded to: “2024 is pretty much the timeframe for when we see a lot more deployments coming up; mass-market in 2025, probably.”
4 | KNOWLEDGE GAP – PUNK IS DEAD
But before we get ahead of ourselves – and before we put all the extant crises in the way of the supplier market – there remains a major challenge with enterprise knowhow, concluded the panel. Li at Keysight Technologies articulated it well: “Working with customers over the past two years, the thing – [which] is fairly serious and non-technical – is the knowledge gap… [Enterprises] are experts in their own fields, not experts in wireless communication. Even if they have some knowledge, and are convinced that [private 5G] can help them, and want to know the ROI and the process, they don’t always have the in-house experts to [build and manage] the network.”
He went on: “All the technical ones – the standards and features – are being worked on, and progressing steadily… But this knowledge gap is a serious issue.” Chirala at Cisco suggested the old DIY punk ethic – here’s two chords, go form a band – has been generally discarded among enterprises, after their difficult early experiences to integrate and manage twin radio and core networks. She said: “They tried to do it on their own and quickly realised the complexity of it – to do two complex things and manage all of it. Which is when they started to turn to [external parties] to stitch the solution together as a managed service.”
What about the enterprise on the panel? How has Arçelik Global found the knowledge gap? Pazar responded: “We started talking with Nokia back in 2018, and went with its DAC solution, which is a one-stop shop for us. But yes, [you] need professional services early on. It’s not that easy as a DIY project. But because of its strategic importance, our entire network team embraced the challenge and right now we can run the network on our own. But yes, you definitely need help with the initial network planning and understanding of the new technology.”
5 | NETWORK CONVERGENCE – MARRIAGE STORY
Which leads us to the challenge of network integration, and how private 5G fits with other enterprise networking tech. Let’s start outside of the enterprise venue, to discuss how private 5G networks are starting to mesh with public 5G networks – and to hear from Richie Gill at KORE Wireless, which is offering a global eSIM service for IoT data connections on top of a roster of national roaming contracts. This idea of private-to-public IoT traffic was sniffed at a couple of years back, on the grounds that enterprises are paranoid control freaks that want all of their data retained in private-edge networks. As with the Industry 4.0 trend to use big public cloud platforms for certain data streams, there is a steady move to embrace public 5G as a complement for IoT tracking services and private 5G fallback.
Gill explained: “The initial focus was just to deploy these private networks. But, as we predicted, there was always this question about what to do when an asset leaves or enters a facility. At the moment, there are two different types of use cases: inbound roaming, such as with a campus or stadium, where users enter onto a private network, which requires collaboration between the micro and macro network; and outbound roaming, which is linked with eSIM capabilities, and which is where we want to orchestrate connectivity between private and public 5G. The second is picking up momentum with requests and trials; many enterprises already have a private network, and want to track assets out of it. That’s the use case we are trying to solve.”
Of course, there is on-site integration, as well, mostly with Wi-Fi – which is how Cisco is positioning its private 5G offer, as a converged enterprise LAN system. “The end goal is that these two networks… should behave and be managed in the same way,” said Chirala. But she suggested, as well, the Cisco convergence offer is much broader. “It is just not about integration with Wi-Fi… Cisco has an entire portfolio across security, collaboration, networking, and so on. So we are making sure our 5G solution integrates with our enterprise portfolio,” she said.
Meanwhile, Pazar at Arçelik Global reminded everyone – in case it needed saying – that 5G is only another network utility service, albeit a very capable one. He said: “If I may add, most of the time [5G] is compared to different technologies, but 5G is like a Boeing Dreamliner. It has extra capacity and its own characteristics, but it still takes you from point A to point B. A Cessna also goes from A to B, and it is not that Cessna is a bad plane. Which is the analogy with Wi-Fi – which also gets you there.” The point, one supposes, is they can both do a job, but their selection depends on the job that needs to be done – and that enterprises have all kinds of jobs to do.
