5G has not yet caused a “wow” effect in the general public. Some two years after its commercial debut in France, the new mobile telephony standard had convinced only 6.2 million users in the third quarter of 2022. That is 6% of the total number of SIM cards in circulation in our country, according to the latest count from Arcep.
Faced with this measured adoption, operators are betting on the professional market to monetize their networks, through their private 5G offers. As the name suggests, it is about offering a company its own infrastructure, independent of the public network. It has a guaranteed quality of service in terms of throughput and latency while benefiting from increased security. Essential parameters to ensure coverage of an industrial site or a logistics warehouse.
Annual growth of 38%
Less glamorous than foldable and drop-down smartphones or cyber dogs, this private 5G was the unexpected star of the latest edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which closed its doors on March 2. Operators, equipment manufacturers and cloud providers have multiplied announcements in this area.
The market is, in fact, buoyant. According to IDC, it should reach 8.3 billion dollars by 2026 against 1.7 billion dollars in 2021, representing an average annual growth of 35.7% over the period. The research firm believes that the private 5G market is still in its infancy, with the first experiments primarily concerning the industrial world.
In France, Alcatel Submarine Networks and ArcelorMittal recently communicated on their first use cases in terms of process digitization and predictive maintenance. Other players may be interested, such as construction professionals to connect their construction sites or energy companies to cover their gas or electricity distribution networks.
Nokia and Cisco make private 5G a priority
Future converts to private 5G will not lack commercial contacts. Beyond the operators who all have a dedicated offer in their portfolio, their equipment manufacturers are also in the running. With its new strategic plan, Nokia intends to refocus on the business market and places private 5G in a good place to seduce them.
Cisco multiplies, on its side, partnerships. With Intel, the network specialist is creating reference architectures for private 5G services dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT). It partners with another chipmaker, Qualcomm, to simplify the management and orchestration of multi-vendor radio access network (RAN) systems. A way to accelerate the adoption of private 5G in business.
With the Japanese operator NTT, Cisco intends to bring private 5G to the automotive, logistics, health, distribution and public administration sectors. On the American market, the equipment manufacturer is this time going through its partners Red River and Federated Wireless to convince government authorities of the benefits of private 5G.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been looking for expertise on the market. The day before the opening of the MWC, the American group announced the acquisition of Athonet. Based in Vicenza, Italy, this provider has been providing 4G and 5G mobile networks for more than 15 years. He has more than 450 deployments to his credit in hospitals, airports, ports or public services.
AWS partner of major European operators
Cloud providers also intend to take advantage of the buoyant wind. AWS has a complete portfolio of services dedicated to operators, including private 5G (AWS Private 5G) and edge computing (AWS Wavelength) offers. The world leader in the public cloud has further enriched it by announcing a program for the deployment and management of private mobile networks by associating with partner operators including Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica.
The show also provided an opportunity to discuss Pikeo, Orange’s experimental private 5G network. Both standalone and cloud-native, it can be deployed on the French group’s infrastructure, in the AWS cloud or in hybrid mode thanks to AWS Outposts (AWS infrastructure in on-premise mode).
For its part, Microsoft Azure has announced the general availability of Private 5G Core. This service makes it possible to deploy and operate private 5G networks at the edge of the cloud (edge computing) via the Azure Arc platform.
Even TowerCo are eyeing private 5G. These companies are no longer content to rent their pylons to operators, they also deploy so-called “active” antennas. World leader in this market, Cellnex intends to diversify into private 5G according to The echoes. The Spanish group has already won a contract to cover metro lines 16 and 17 of the future Grand Paris Express.
Finally, we will end this overview with an atypical French actor. A private technological research institute, B<>Com presented at the MWC its own private 5G core network solution, natively designed for the cloud and whose implementation is 100% software.
