Cisco Private 5G gives businesses 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.
Update: Cisco has since wound back its Private 5G offering. If you're weighing private cellular for a site, talk to the team about current options.
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.
To kick off with, let’s look at the options you have. For industrial grade wireless, there are three main options:
The image below (courtesy of Cisco) details where you might use Wi-Fi vs private 5G:
As complementary technologies they each have strengths:
Not all technology decisions are driven by technology alone. You may choose to deploy Private 5G alone, but if you decide to deploy alongside a Wi-Fi deployment, there are some good reasons to do this. The main business reasons are:
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.
The 5G stack allows for enterprise grade control of clients and applications that can interact:
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 5G. 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:
The list below details the typical components used to build the Private 5G deployment. Note the 5G radios themselves are not supplied by Cisco. Typical components include:
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.
It’s 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
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 vehicle 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.
IPTel is a Cisco Preferred Partner designing, deploying and managing networks across Australia. If you'd like to talk about your network, get in touch with the IPTel team or email sales@iptel.com.au.