the advent of 5g introduced a lot of opportunity
for networking innovation private 5g is one of those potential innovations but what makes it
different than your average public 5g and what's the enterprise benefit stick around
hey everyone welcome back to today in tech i'm julia poshimp and i'm here with network world
senior writer john gold thank you john so much for being with us today so thank you for having
me like i said 5g is something that we talk about a lot here on the channel and it's obviously a
very hot topic and by now any consumer is pretty familiar with 5g even if they don't necessarily
have you know the full scope of 5g millimeter wave at their disposal wherever they live or
depending on what kind of phone they have but private 5g is an interesting concept
and i know that it's not quite a market yet but i'm interested to hear like what is private 5g
and yeah exactly how is it different than the the public 5g that we're all now pretty familiar with
um so the main thing to understand about it is that um it is 5g it's just essentially a it's a
version of 5g that you are in some way as a as an end user creating yourself it's not being provided
to you by you know um the verizons and att's of the world it's something that you know either
you know a service provider is creating for you um but yeah the the clue is in the name it's its own
you know private network you know created for your uh for you the end user's own purposes
so that's all you know well and good but i'm wondering what the sort of enterprise play is here
and what if you are you know a cio of perhaps like a manufacturing company you've got a big warehouse
what is the enterprise play here and what is the draw to private 5g
the draw is as i understand it essentially boils down to latency um the only you know real
i guess to back up wi-fi you know enterprise wi-fi in its most modern forms uh and private 5g use are
you actually using a lot of the same kind of radio techniques to you know do things like cut back on
latency to do things like you know provide you know really fast bandwidth to you know any to a
number of different uh connections at once um the only real difference at this point seems
to be that you know the private network you know you're necessarily not going to have other people
you know on those bands you know whereas with the unlicensed bands uh in in wi-fi you know you
can use all the tricks you want but you know the fact remains that particularly in you know well
populated areas the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands are just lousy with you know everyone using it uh for
you know whatever purpose they want so there's there's going to be some interference likely
okay and i know that this isn't this really isn't necessarily something that's widespread
at all yet i know it's it's it's certainly right now um like i may have already said like
newly hyped let's say but if this is something that is appealing to
an enterprise what does the process even look like for implementing private 5g
well um generally you're going to need to go through a vendor of some kind uh to you know
you're going to need radio equipment uh you're going to need you know um the the kind of back end
you know uh setup that will allow you to run it um all which is different from enterprise wi-fi
and you know needs a different kind of expertise um and of course you know one of the big problems
with it is that it's um you know it's still licensed uh it's still licensed wireless so you
know you need to actually have some kind of legal right to use um the frequencies you want to um to
you know create your network so you know that's tricky because you know obviously buying your own
spectrum can be really expensive in many cases um although which is not to say it can't be done um
you know if you're the right kind of business perhaps if it's you know
work operating in you know not right in a major population center um could theoretically buy up
its own um bandwidth and use it however it wants um and there's also the cbrs system which you know
has really opened up the possibilities for um you know semi-licensed i guess you'd call it use of uh
5g airwaves sure so let's talk a little bit about the the use cases and also the what
sort of barrier to entry might there be with private 5g obviously it seems like you already
mentioned one it's different than enterprise wi-fi it's different to implement and therefore
requires a much a different set of skills and different expertise so yeah let's let's talk
about the barriers to entry before we talk about the the real world practical use cases
so yeah like i said the barriers to entry are um as i mentioned you know it can be difficult to
you know get um you know get the frequency get the rights to the frequency you want um but also you
know i kind of touched on it i guess in passing um you know there's just years and years of you know
accumulated institutional knowledge in you know any firm of any size um you know around enterprise
wi-fi you know people people know how that works people have you know kept up with the changes
um it's you know very well understood technology and that's just not the case you know in
the enterprise uh for private network for um private license networks like this um you do have
some private lte floating around um and that's you know that has its uses and everything but you know
just the you know in you know in-house you're unlikely to have the kind of um institutional
knowledge you need to you know architect and operate a private 5g network by yourself so
it certainly sounds like a challenge and a challenge to implement so i guess then why would
what is like the sort of perfect scenario for someone who is is in a debate between private 5g
and enterprise wi-fi even though if currently that those people might be small in number what is what
sort of tangible benefits does private 5g offer over a really robust enterprise wi-fi network
um i think the core one is probably latency um you know as i mentioned there's you know this being
you know licensed connectivity you're um there's gonna be much much much less if you know and
ideally no interference um on these networks so anything that is you know incredibly um latency
dependent like factory orchestration you know just coordinating how large you know complicated
machines are um are interacting is gonna be um you know that could have a private 5g could have its
advantages there um and actually the the other one is range you know you can likely cover more
ground with fewer access points your base stations or whatever you want to call them
with a private license network than you can with um enterprise wi-fi so you know it's less
it's you know it's hard to you know say anything categorical about you know these are the use cases
for it you know with the exception of obviously industrial which which i just touched on but
um you know if your implementation is dependent on you know range and latency then yeah that private
5g might have its upsides for you so like you were saying john it seems like a big use case here is
in a big manufacturing plant and if you're in a big manufacturing plant i would imagine
they've got a lot of iot devices that need to be communicating with each other near
constantly where even if delay of a few seconds could be really detrimental to your business so
can you talk a little bit about how private 5g ties into iot and edge computing
yeah absolutely um and to be clear delays of milliseconds could be you know a problem
in certain kinds of settings but yeah like you pointed out the the big uh story around private
5g and iot and the edge is latency and they're like we've talked about there are definitely um
there are definitely use cases where you know you do have you know this need for everything to be
interconnected constantly and at very low latency um you know there's uh some people have denied an
idea that it's going to be useful for um like the healthcare sector with you know if you need
high-tech imaging in real time you know private 5g type of bandwidth and um you know response time to
handle that but um to be honest with you a lot you know probably the majority of iot implementations
out there um simply they don't need this kind of you know extremely high performance
connection that um private 5g offers so you know to be honest with you i struggle to see
you know where you where you'd really need this in preference to something you know that might
be easier to deploy and uh and also quite a lot cheaper fair enough and if anyone is interested
in reading a bit more about this topic i will link below a few articles from network world
that um are talking about and it's pretty interesting because they sort of they're within
the past two-ish year so it's interesting to see even just in the past two years how private 5g has
evolved so i'll link those below for further reading so thank you so much john for calling
in and chatting with me i think this was pretty interesting and i feel like this probably isn't
the last that we've heard about private 5g like you said um because it is sort of in its infancy
so i think it'll be interesting to if anything crazy happens to have you back on absolutely
thanks for having me thanks and thank you all so much for watching this episode of today in tech if
you liked this video please do give it a thumbs up and you can subscribe to our channel and then hit
the bell icon so you're notified every single time we post a new video if you have any questions or
comments about private 5g or if you can theorize another specific use case i'd like to hear them
please leave them in the comments below thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
you