Cisco Private 5G

Cisco Private 5G gives business the opportunity to run their own mobile network. This isn’t a simple undertaking of course, but it does offer some valuable benefits for businesses that have the right use cases.

If you’re a mining business, needing to cover large spaces, or have a requirement to connect autonomous vehicles, or have a large number of 5G capable devices to support – then Private 5G might be a great solution for your business.

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What are the Options?

To kick off with, let’s look at the options you have. For industrial grade wireless, there are three main options:

• Wi-Fi: Ubiquitous, cost effective and well understood. Can mix multiple use cases on one network.
  
  As with CURWB below, this is deployed as a private network, offering full control and security of the deployment:
  • Wi-Fi Drawback: Unlicenced spectrum – hard to guarantee performance.
  • Wi-Fi Advantage: Ubiquitous and (relatively speaking) cost effective
    
    
• CURWB: Cisco Ultra Reliable Wireless Backhaul is a technology known as ‘wireless fibre’.
   
  The main difference is “make before break” which unlike Wi-Fi means a client does not disconnect while roaming. Highly reliable, built for industrial and automation:
  • Advantage: Uses shared spectrum (5GHz), but proprietary protocol – deterministic, low latency, high bandwidth.
    
    
• 5G: Likely the more expensive option but has the advantage of high transmit power (so less base stations) and the great advantage of the use of dedicated spectrum (provides deterministic guaranteed characteristic low latency, high speed bandwidth).
  
  This likely avoids possible interference and contention that can be seen on Wi-Fi (and possibly CURWB):
  • Issue: Lack of control / visibility of Public 5G: solved with Private 5G.

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Wi-Fi and 5G

The image below (courtesy of Cisco) details where you might use Wi-Fi vs private 5G:

As complementary technologies they each have strengths:

• Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and cost effective.
• End devices are more likely to be available for Wi-Fi.
• Wi-Fi is susceptible to interference, 5G less so.
• 5G has higher TX power, so greater range.
• 5G may have lower latency for real time applications.
• Normal 5G: Lack of control and visibility: resolved with Private 5G.
  

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The Private 5G Business Case

Not all technology decisions are driven by technology alone. You may choose to deploy Private 5G along, but if you decide to deploy alongside a Wi-Fi deployment, there are some good reasons to do this. The main business reasons are:

• Resilience / Duplication: The primary reason to deploy both Wi-Fi and 5G is network duplication. This assumes the duplication of switching and radio:
  • The separate network and spectrum provide complete duplication – higher resilience, lower risk.
  • Depending on the end client, they can be configured to fail back to Wi-Fi (or 5G), or roam between the two sets of spectrum.
• Overlap: Two overlapping sets of spectrum, providing a wider coverage to site.
• Device Support: Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, but some devices may be only 5G – or have been certified with 5G.

There is one major advantage to deploying your own Private 5G – regulated spectrum. This should deliver a clean spectrum that you can legally protect.

Shared spectrum technologies, such as Wi-Fi allow many clients to share the same spectrum and there is no protection from interference. Private 5G though does offer this major advantage – the more mission critical your requirement, the easier the case for regulated spectrum stacks up.

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Cisco Private 5G

The 5G stack allows for enterprise grade control of clients and applications that can interact:

• Control and visibility you typically will not get on 5G.
• Private 5G allows this.

What does this mean? With a Cisco Private 5G deployment, you can integrate other Cisco technologies in a way you can’t with telco supplied 5. This image below from Cisco provides some insight – the 5G deployment is built at the core with Cisco technologies typically already well understood and available in the enterprise space:

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Typical 5G Equipment

The list below details the typical components used to build the Private 5G deployment. Note the 5G radios themselves are not supplied by Cisco and can be a choice of:

• Base Stations: Radio base stations for 5G.
  • Spectrum Rental: Rental of regulated spectrum.
• SIM Management System Licencing: $75k AUD (Year 1).
• Radio Management Servers: $150k AUD.
• Clock Source: Used for radio timing.
• Annual MSP: Monitoring and management of the system (radio network and Cisco infrastructure) ~$200k.
• Professional Services: Design and install, including radio install.
  

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Deployment Roles and Responsibilities 

A Private 5G deployment is an undertaking that requires multiple parties, and these are detailed in the image below, along with their relevant roles:

At IPTel we act as the integrator to build out the solution and can then manage it with our Managed Service practice, so you don’t have to skill up on a solution which is highly specialised, and due to its criticality to your business needs monitoring and support.

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Cisco Private 5G: Summary 

Its worth noting in this summary the main reason you wouldn’t deploy Private 5G, and that’s the cost. It’s much cheaper to deploy a Wi-Fi network, but as detailed in this blog, there are some major reasons why you would deploy your own Private 5G network.

If you have the use case, and the business case stacks up, the ability to deploy, control and integrate your own 5G network is something pretty unique.

The technology is most likely deployed in large industrial sites, such as mining and can be used for autonomous vehicles control. You will manage and maintain your own SIM cards, just like a normal Telco and be able to secure the network much more closely.

Wi-Fi may more commonly be a better choice – but the case for Private 5G stacks up in a range of use cases.

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