There are possibly incongruous replies about interest in private mobile networks in a recent Technalysis Research survey of business information technology decision makers.
On one hand, 57 percent of respondents said they planned to add “private 5G’ while 44 percent said they would add “private 4G.”
On the other hand, asked about pandemic spending shifts, private cellular networks dipped the most, suggesting it is a “nice to have” but not “must have” priority right now.
The obvious explanation, assuming respondents understood the terms “private 5G,” “private 4G” and “private cellular network” is that those investments or upgrades are not mission critical right now, but are desirable when normalcy returns and IT spending is not dominated by sudden support for nearly-universal work from home.
That would be in keeping with surveys showing enterprise interest in using small cells to bolster premises mobile coverage, especially to support 5G services in the millimeter wave region.
On the other hand, there is some possibility that respondents understood “private 5G” or “private 4G” to mean “more use of mobile services.” Few--if any--other surveys have detected such a strong belief that private cellular networks are presently on the roadmap of IT professionals across all industry segments.
To be sure, forecasts of private 5G infrastructure spending do resemble adoption curves for 5G or small cell deployments generally.
One question with no obvious answer is how enterprises plan to use private 5G, as that determines how the private networks interconnect with public networks. For machine-to-machine applications and internet of things use cases, backhaul to an internet point of presence is needed.
If support for public network voice and messaging is required, then interconnection with the mobile service provider’s network is required, using neutral host, dedicated interfaces to one or more mobile service provider radio networks (a repeater or public network small cell or direct connection to the mobile backhaul network using a baseband connection.
One new option would be direct connection to the host mobile network using a network slice. A radio slice would tend to work where volume of data is not too great. Where volume is quite heavy a more-traditional optical connection to the mobile network might be preferable, where the private 5G network radio traffic goes to a baseband controller for backhaul to the core network.
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