Background As one of the significant part of new infrastructure, 5G is focused by the world. The high rate, low latency and wide connectivity of 5G as well as the integrated application with diverse scenarios in all industries brings great changes to the development of social economy.
Apart from the 5G communication, the more potential market lies on the vertical industries and the digital transformation, achieving the maximum commercial value of 5G.
The application of 5G in all industries drives private 5G network to develop and innovate.
What’s the essence of private 5G network? The private 5G network is born to meet the requirements of high-certainty, high-reliability and high-security.
5G has the characteristics and capabilities of cloud-native, Microservices, NFV (Network Function Virtualization), MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), network slicing and so on, enabling it becomes the first native mobile network supporting the construction of private network. 5GC (5G Core Network) is a cloud-native and software-defined network with NFV instead of using expensive hardware equipment. All the network capabilities can be flexibly deployed on the common cloud-based equipment in vertical industries.
Meanwhile, 5GC achieves the goal of separating user plane and control plane, which enables UPF (User Plane Function) become lightweight and distributed. It ensures the data security and low latency application in vertical industries.
The challenges of deploying private 5G network
The great potential of private 5G network (Source: ABI)
There is great potential in the private 5G network market, while with the increasing deployment cases, challenges can not be ignored.
On one hand, the lack of private network spectrum resources causes the high cost of deploying private 5G network by oneself in vertical industries.
On the other hand, as the main force of constructing and operating private 5G network and public 5G network, operators are confronted with challenges from both internal and external aspect. By virtue of the independent operation of constructing private 5G network in vertical industries, AWS, Alibaba, New H3C and relevant giants and providers can also compete in the market of private 5G network. Therefore, operators’ revenue of 5G To B may be carved up.
To minimize the loss, operators should have a clear plan of exploring the commercial market, innovating end-to-end relevant competitive products, optimizing external network construction.
How do operators overcome these challenges? Operators can take some measures:
1. Decouple UPF and construct lightweight private network; develop the synchronous construction of MEC, edge cloud and CDN; explore the application of MEP capability; deploy UPF with MEC..
2. Cooperate and optimize the terminals, wireless spectrum distribution, QoS, SRv6 (Segment Routing v6) /Flex-E (Flexible Ethernet), core network slicing. Moreover, realize the end to end slicing management and operated capabilities to construct a complete private 5G virtual network.
3. Construct a comprehensive understanding of the requirements from vertical industries. After the investigation of market, integrate OT (Operation Technology), IT (Information Technology), CT (Communication Technology) by combining the capabilities, platform and ecosystem.
Conclusion In 5G era, the construction of private network becomes one of the essential means of growing income and transforming services for operators. The private 5G network is the crucial part of new infrastructure and the drivers of promote the development of society.
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