AUGUST 2021 PRIVATE ENTERPRISE NOCs

AUGUST 2021

mobile operatorsWhere and how will

DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: PRIVATE 5G

by James BlackmanEditor, Enterprise IoT Insights

5GNOCs

PRIVATEENTERPRISE

manage private 5Genterprise networks?

F E A T U R E R E P O R T

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At times, during the investigation of this subject, the original premise seemed practically untenable. The concept, entirely logical on a num-

ber of levels, that mobile network operators will seek to establish dedicated regional (‘edge’) network operations centres (NOCs) to manage new private 5G networks on behalf of digitally-progressive industrial enclaves appeared to be problematic. It would be too resource intensive, the response came.

The idea, a step beyond, they would install engineers on site, at the very far edge of the cloud/network continuum, was laughed out of town. No way, they said; big national net-work operators are not in the way, nor in the position, to easily scale-down; the collective business model for national carriers is not de-signed to serve myriad different enterprises in myriad different industrial sectors, running myriad different disciplines.

“[Enterprises] don’t want a NOC; they want a self-optimizing access technology that works out-of-the-box, which they can run and manage on their own... [And] the last thing an operator wants is to put a person


on site. They don’t want to build an enter-prise NOC, either. Not because a NOC is not needed, but because the enterprise doesn’t want to pay for it,” argued Francis Haysom, principal analyst at Appledore Research, over in the blue corner, back in April.

Worse, Vodafone, in the red, the most stra-tegically candid and clear-sighted operator in the business, appeared to backtrack. To be clear; the idea of regional NOCs as a discus-sion point came (to us) from Vodafone, dur-ing a previous conversation. The UK-based


operator said it was looking to ape its model for stolen vehicle tracking, where it has es-tablished 52 operating centres across the world to liaise with car drivers, car makers, and crime agencies.

“We [are managing] mission critical [net-work] services today, already… But I think the model will be different. For us, we are going to need a NOC… Whether to have a dedicated enterprise NOC for mobile private networks? I don’t know. But you can imagine we will have something like that,” responded Phil Skipper, group head of IoT strategy and business development at Vodafone Business, in the same report. But now, exploring the subject further, the deal is off, says Skipper.

Vodafone will serve enterprises from a centralised NOC, with a network of support services in the field for emergency call-outs. Figuratively, momentarily, Enterprise IoT Insights hunches its shoulders, and scratch-es its head; how, then, to write 5,000-odd words on carrier-led edge-management of 5G networks? But the thing is, looking again, Vodafone has not backtracked, actually; its position was speculative in the first place, and its formal strategy tallies, actually.

The thing is, as well, that nothing is writ-ten, nothing is decided, nothing is out of the question – which means, of course, there is more to say. (Five thousand words? No sweat.) The private 5G market is shiny-new for suppliers, just as it is for enterprises. Dig-ging further, with Vodafone and with others, it is clear every card is on the table and every ‘thing’ is to play for. Operators will, it turns out, build dedicated NOCs to serve regional enterprises.

Vodafone is not writing-off the idea of moving its own support functions closer to the action; it just comes down to network densities, it says, and the natural “ebb and flow” as the industrial market finds its rhythm with both standalone and hybrid setups. Plus, everyone agrees, service providers will invariably – clearly, and of course – put staff on site.

So we have a story to be getting on with, even if it remains complex, nuanced, and messy, and even if the nascent private 5G market remains hard to define.

“[Enterprises] don’t want a NOC; they want a self-optimizing access technology that works out-of-the-box, which they can run and manage on their own... The last thing an operator wants is to put a person on site.”

FOREWORD

Francis Haysom, principal analyst, Appledore Reseacrh

Inside the Vodafone NOC in Newbury (Image: JMComms.com)

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F E A T U R E R E P O R TF E A T U R E R E P O R T

Private LTE/5Gdeployments

$0bn

Growth – the value-percentage of private 5G deploy-ments will outrun private LTE deployments in 2029, according to ABI Research.

$20bn

$40bn

$60bn

2022 2024 2026 2028 2030

But let’s start with some ‘givens’ about the in-life management of private cel-lular networks, and specifically about the role of mobile operators in this

‘run’-phase discipline – after the project has been scoped and negotiated (as part of the ‘sell’ phase), and the construction has been finished (in the ‘build’ phase). Let’s start with what we know for sure – or what we think we know, based on conjecture in the market.

The first ‘fact’ – reasoned guesswork, some envelope maths – is that all of this matters. Just because all of this is going to be massive, we hear, for both the supply-side telecoms sector and demand-side enterprise market. The first will gain new life in terms of its sales income and corporate worth; the second will have a base-level networking platform to drive transformational change. So the story goes. But how massive? It depends who you ask.

The simplest, (perhaps best) market-sizing calculation remains Nokia’s. Counting-out in-dustrial targets for its (then-new) ‘digital au-tomation cloud’ (DAC) package a couple of years back, it claimed no fewer than 14.5 mil-lion potential venues for private LTE and 5G, including 10.7 million ‘industrial and manu-facturing’ plants, 3.3 million warehouses, and 50,000 transport hubs – plus thousands of

power stations, water utilities, mines, and so on (see box, page 4).

As a frame of reference, all the ‘public’ mo-bile infrastructure in the world comprises seven million macro base stations. “It’s sev-en million [public base stations] versus 15 million [private networks],” the Finnish ven-dor said at the time. What does that some-thing-billion target mean in money terms? ABI Research reckons the total market value will be around $65 billion in 2030 (with $37 billion going on 5G, and the rest on LTE), from a couple of billion dollars today.

In line with Nokia’s segmentation, man-ufacturing will spend biggest in the peri-od, with a little under a quarter (about $15 billion) of the spend. Spending on private and shared enterprise networks will surpass spending on public cellular networks in about 15 years – even after 6G upgrades to some public networks, presumably. Maybe Nokia’s cell site ratio can be mapped to this. Either way, ABI says the balance tilts towards enterprises in about 2036.

But Dell’Oro Group says sales revenue from radio equipment, as a slice of the tech sup-ply-stack, will top just $2 billion by 2025 – a fraction of ABI’s 2030 forecast figure for the ‘total’ market value. It says the balance shifts to 5G by the end of the period. No estimates

PART 1 |

Mobile operators – and the developing role of private5G network managementWhy private 5G matters, why the market is so excitable, and why the perceived jeopardy for mobile operators is overplayed

Private LTE (4G) – market value

Private 5G – market value


4

are available for a 2020/21 start-point. But Stefan Pongratz, vice president at the firm, says the number of installations is in the “low single-digit thousands”, rising to “tens of thousands” in 2025.

The Dell’Oro forecast also covers private network ‘slices’ of public network infra-structure, covering revenues from the sale of large-sized wide-area macro cells, ‘small’ sized wide-area micro cells, and ‘small’ sized local-area pico cells. Which represents a range of deployment scenarios – making the order-of-magnitude discrepancy with ABI’s forecast confusing. No matter; what these numbers say is that the market will explode, somewhere between ‘big’ and ‘bigger’.

Pongratz reflects: “The hype around pri-vate wireless is more warranted this time, rel-ative to previous enterprise small-cell hype cycles, reflecting progress with the five key components – spectrum, technology, aware-ness, cloud players, and use cases. Once we factor in all the various private wireless mar-kets, the overall market opportunity is rather large – in the tens of billions. But it will take time to realize its full potential.”

SUPPLY RATIOSWhat we know, then, is that – whatever happens, when-ever it happens – it will hap-pen. But what else do we think we know? What of the role of traditional operators, with so much to gain and so much to lose? Much is written about the perceived jeopardy for them – that their monopoly on spectrum is being broken market-by-mar-ket, and that industrial paranoia and plug-and-play cellular will ex-clude them from critical networks and jettison them from non-critical ones.

We will get into some of that, invariably. But despite the chorus of naysayers, mostly from the ranks of early-adopter enterprises and new-breed suppliers, we know for sure – we must know – that many of the old famil-iars in the carrier community are lining up for the play, and will be in position when the cur-

tomer has the right to decide who it wants to work with. Simple as that. In some cases, it doesn’t want to work with an operator, for one reason or another – maybe it feels like they’re just mass-market SIM-card shipping companies. But in other cases they trust them completely.” So says Stephane Daeu-ble, head of marketing for enterprise solu-tions at Nokia.

He continues: “Different surveys from dif-ferent analysts suggest enterprises favour system integrators (SIs) in about 40 percent of cases; they want end-to-end solutions, and SIs are seen to be able to bring together a network of partners. But about 30 percent prefer to go with operators, and another 30 percent prefer vendors. That seems to be the way the market is breaking up.”

Of course, system integration is a broad church – from specialists in ‘vertical’ markets to generalists in enterprise IT, to multination-al professional services companies like Ac-centure and Capgemini. Indeed, SIs are the flavour of the month in telco-land, especially among 5G kit suppliers for new channels to market – and especially, according to a flurry of recent announcements, for flow of net-working gear into enterprises in the home of Industrie 4.0. (See Nokia’s deal with Smart IT Labs, and the full-stack one-two arrange-ments Airspan Networks and Druid Software have with Siticom.)

But Vodafone questions Nokia’s ratios, and thinks it is probably talking about the ‘build’ phase, and not the ‘run’ phase. It would make sense; on reflection, Nokia’s response was to a question about who takes ‘charge’ – which might be interpreted both ways, and tends to default to the ‘build’ phase in most conver-sations. Vendors sell, integrators build, and operators run, responds Skipper at Vodafone

“The SI part is way overstated,” he says. “Why would you think an SI has more ex-perience running networks than a network operator? There is probably confusion about the build and run phases. Could I imagine that kind of ratio for the build? Yes, probably, just because it is more of an open shop. But for the run? No, I think it would be turned on its head – with operators and vendors in the run phase, plus some specialist SIs that do

IM+

I00K+

I0K+

IK+

INDUSTRY SITES

Industrial & manufacturing 10,710,000

Warehouses 3,300,000

Hospitals & labs 263,000

Water utilities 140,000

Mining 54,000

Transport venues & ports 50,000

Power generation 47,600

Military bases 10,000

Oil & gas 8,000

TOTAL 10,710,000

SIZE

Source: Nokia

Potential venues for private 5G

2029– when total market

value for private cellular tilts towards

5G, away from LTE/4G

– ABI Research

2025– when private

network RAN value (only) tilts to 5G,

away from LTE/4G

–Dell’Oro Group

... and / or

tain is raised. The only question really is who else will be on stage with them, and how will all the new parts will be divided up.

Nokia has a good line on this. “The cus-

Battleground – carrier are facing-off in OT environments

5


private networks.” Pressed on likely market shares, he re-

sponds: “Just waving a finger in the air, I would imagine it is more like 35-40 percent operators and 35-40 percent vendors, and the rest is made of A. N. Others. It is the run phase where you need different types of infrastructure – the service desks and mon-itoring capabilities, and all the rest. And we see significant synergies from applying our existing infrastructures to mobile private networks.”

This last comment is key to the conversa-tion, of course. But just to further the case for carrier-led network management, against rivals bids from SIs in particular, it might be noted IBM – tipped by market commenta-tors in the Enterprise IoT Insights report on industrial 5G SLAs from April as the SI-style operative most likely to succeed at private 5G management – has stated it is undecided, as yet, about whether to offer managed net-work services to enterprises.

The company is focused on the supply of hybrid cloud and analytics services in con-junction with traditional telecoms provid-ers, it says. It is working variously with Nokia and Samsung, among kit vendors, and AT&T, Telefónica, and Vodafone, among mobile op-erators, to integrate compute and connectiv-ity into edge bundles for enterprises seeking to get on the road with digital change.

Marisa Viveros, the company’s vice pres-ident of strategy and offerings in IBM’s tel-ecom, media and entertainment division, comments: “What we are doing, primarily, is consulting – on spectrum, on architecture. Plus, we are also doing integration. Right now, the market is focused on how to put [private 5G] together and build it – as op-posed to operating networks. So it is still to be seen whether or not IBM will operate [pri-vate 5G networks].”

SI-FICTIONSTo further unravel the stubborn SI discourse around in-life 5G management, Germa-ny-based Software AG, playing between the lines in the supply of industrial-grade cel-lular with carrier types and industrial sorts, suggests SIs are in trouble, caught between

hyper-scalers and the telecoms providers. Bernd Gross, chief technology officer at the firm, has them down as IT types, it seems, running data centres.

In this definition, at least, they are out of the game. He says: “When you look at that anyhow-trend towards the cloud, most of the [OT] workloads are going onto hyper-scaler clouds, onto AWS and Azure. They are not going into the SI clouds; it is always one of the big clouds. So I think the SIs are in a dif-ficult position at the moment – sandwiched between the cloud guys and these tech pro-viders coming in [to the OT space].”

Interestingly, Gross thinks the case for enterprises to take charge is overstated, as well. It is a modish trend, he implies, part of the industrial discipline to get to grips with novel technology, symptomatic of a broader move to prime the pump for Industry 4.0. It will not last, he says. The bigger trend in IT, and also in operational technology (OT), is to outsource compute workloads, he observes – which runs contrary to the concept of in-house 5G management.

“If you think of 5G coming into that trend, it doesn’t make sense for IT departments to manage the 5G network themselves... There is less and less knowledge on site, and more and more normalisation in the cloud – to scale-up business.”

Mostly nothing is coming back in-house. Run-phase management of 5G for Industry 4.0 must be viewed in this context, he says. “5G is an important complement to digital-ise these factory scenarios. But that [process] will not be handled, typically, by the factory owners. In 80 percent of cases, perhaps, fac-tory owners will look to outside partners to help build and run these 5G environments.” This contradicts the statement from Apple-dore at the top of the piece.

We should distinguish between edge placement and edge management. Gross is not suggesting the infrastructure is being centralised; privately-operated 5G in private-ly-licensed spectrum will be localised, on premise, and distributed through the edge-cloud continuum in German-style cam-pus-netz. Only the run-phase edge-man-agement – data-crunching, insight-making,

“The market is focused right now on how to put [private 5G] together and build it – as opposed to operating networks. So it is still to be seen whether IBM will operate [enterprise networks].”Marisa Viveros, vice president of strategy and offerings for telecoms, media and entertainment, IBM

Build-phase– where the battle is drawn (Image: 123rf)


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He says: “It is still early days. For local 5G systems, we are talking about an installed base closer to a thousand-times, rather than a hundred-times, smaller than enterprise Wi-Fi access points. When it comes to the role of operators, the short answer is it will depend on a confluence of factors including the availability of local spectrum, the size of the enterprise, and the coverage, performance,

and reliability requirements.“[But] operators are playing an important role in the majority of the 1,000-plus deployments so far. This partly reflects the regional mix, with China compris-

ing a significant PNI-NPN share with operators ad-

dressing the bulk of core re-lated tasks using shared user-plane

function (UPF) with customized tools to help private network operators to monitor perfor-mance and manage configurations.

“Given the total-cost-of-ownership and time-to-market benefits of leveraging exist-ing infrastructure, the PNI-NPN model will play an important role outside of China as well, particularly in markets with limited local spectrum. From a use case perspective, we assume the operators will play an important role with industrial IoT and public safety. We see more upside for enterprises to bypass the operators with non-industrial use cases.”

Bernd Gross, chief technology officer,

Software AG

network analytics – is going off-site, and be-ing automated, as possible.

Gross advocates a hybrid architecture, strung across the site edge, network (MEC) edge, and national cloud, with the balance shuffled between with latency, reliability, and criticality requirements according to a hierarchy of industrial use cases. “We are talk-ing about all of it, everywhere; it is about life-cycle management – about how to operate and make sure these networks run according to prescribed SLAs. The winning architecture is going to be a hybrid one.”

The opportunity for the telecoms commu-nity, also leveraging hyper-scaler infrastruc-ture, is in over-the-top management. The hyperscalers, he reasons, are not much inter-ested in the nitty-gritty of running industri-al operations, even as they have forced the trend to outsource technology services in industry. It does not fit their business model, the logic goes.

Gross comments: “They are more interest-ed to get workloads onto their clouds. Some-thing like a third of their revenue is profit – because they have a completely automated and standardised offering. To an extent, they are less interested in very bespoke industrial know-how.”

INDUSTRIAL SPECIALISTSSo, the sense is the Vodafone ratios are about right; with SIs in trouble and hyper-scalers in-different, the ground is left for telecoms – to make it work or mess it up. The catch, which this report will not explore much further, is in the line about “domain knowhow”. Specialist knowledge runs vertically in the industrial layer, as well as horizontally in the network-ing layer, reasons Gross – with both spiralling outwards from a baseline architecture that is all sewn up.

The point is telcos will either face-off or join-with industrial giants like Bosch, Gen-eral Electric, Rockwell, and Siemens in the management of enterprise 5G networks. His position is well summed-up by a throwaway comment, from some time ago, about the extant challenge for operators to walk into industry. “You don’t go to a Chinese restau-rant for wienerschnitzel.” Of course, industrial

5G is just wienerschnitzel with Five Spice; it gives the carrier community an ‘in’.

But all of these commentators have vest-ed interests, variously, with the sale of edge equipment and services, and the app-layer gubbins to make these services stick. We should take an independent line, and wel-come back Pongratz at Dell’Oro, with at least two decisive observations: that operators are already engaged in most private 5G setups, and that public-private (non-public) network integration (PNI-NPN), marrying on-site radi-os with public core infrastructure, is the pre-ferred model in most cases.

“[5G] will not be handled by factory owners. In 80 percent

of cases, factory owners willgo to outside partners to

build and run these networks.”

Operations – at the heart of 5G (Image: JMComms)

x1000smaller than enter-

prise Wi-Fi – in terms of installed base

–Dell’Oro Group

Private cellular is

7


APRIL 2021

– industrial 5G network performance,

and management of 5G in Industry 4.0and the new turf war over the supply

DIGITAL FACTORY SOLUTIONS: INDUSTRIAL 5G

5G SLAsINDUSTRIAL


OUT NOW –

CLICK TO LOAD

https://content.rcrwireless.com/industrial_5g_sla_editorial_report


8

Which is a long way into a discus-sion about the various NOC ar-rangements network operators will make to manage private 5G

networks for enterprise customers. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Even if Vodafone has reworked its shorter-term NOC-thinking since we last spoke, other operators have emerged to declare they will, indeed, build dedicated regional NOCs to serve industrial enclaves. Or one has, anyway: Telefónica.

So let us hear, finally, the case for the de-fence. Carlos Carazo, chief technology officer for IoT and big data at Telefónica Tech, the Spain-based firm’s digital-change unit, picks up the thread, remarking that the company has positioned the industrial sector, specif-ically, as one of its priority enterprise seg-ments. “Private networks are our main value proposition,” he says, speaking of its broader SI-style offer within the business market.

Telefónica Tech claims to offer an “end-to-end” private LTE/5G proposition that in-cludes “all the components and services of a private network, and additionally value-add-ed services over and above connectivity”. It is targeting factories, ports, mines, and farms where it has major operations – in Spain, Brazil, the UK, and Germany – with an initial focus on large corporations and a develop-

PART 2 |

Operations centres – and the new 5G edge strategy to serve industrial enclavesHow traditional mobile operators are starting to move private 5G network monitoring and support services closer to the action

ing proposition for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

So what about setting up dedicated NOCs to manage private 5G for enterprises? Is that a part of the plan? “Yes, Telefónica is devel-oping specific NOCs… for the end-to-end technical operation of customers’ private networks... There are private network solu-tions based on public networks that can be managed from general purpose NOCs. How-ever, when the solutions are private and cus-tomised, dedicated and specific operations teams are required.”

What about this argument that the ‘eco-nomics’ don’t stack up for operators to dis-tribute NOCs into the countryside to serve industrial heartlands? Carazo responds: “It will depend on the number of networks de-ployed in a geography. Initially we will con-sider the deployment of regional hubs until demand increases.” So economies-of-scale will come as the industrial heartlands plug into private 5G, reasons the Spanish opera-tor.

And the other question, about staffing customer premises? Would Telefónica ever put an engineer on-site to troubleshoot enterprise networks? “Yes. Customers with specific security requirements with isolated solutions demand these services to assure

“There are private network solutions based on public networks that can be managed from general purpose NOCs. However, when the solutions are private and customised, dedicated operations teams are required.”Carlos Carazo, chief technology officer for IoT and big data, Telefónica Tech

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10

SLA compliance.” Should we be surprised? Of course we shouldn’t; network providers will put engineers on site, of course, when the stakes are high enough.

Common sense says to read between the lines; and the opening line from Appledore snorts only at the idea that mobile opera-tors will make a habit of distributed network support. There are always exceptions, the subtext reads, and the circumstances with mission-critical private 5G are exceptional enough to break the habits of a lifetime, and move support functions into their regional MEC infrastructure, and even on to customer premises at the far edge.

Telefónica’s strategy makes clear it is ad-justing to new enterprise dynamics; Voda-fone’s, while apparently less pronounced, responds in the same way to the need for edge networking support. “When you start to think about sub-networks, you start to get into a very different [NOC] model. You have a public network, but you also have these almost-dark areas inside where magic hap-pens,” reflects Skipper at Vodafone.

This new industrial magic casts different spells, he explains. It is concocted for “oper-ational control of real-time processes”. He says: “The thing is the underlying technolo-gy doesn’t change; what changes is the way you manage the service. The secret is to use the same infrastructure to deploy a different service. The bit people miss is there are two parts to this: how to manage things when the network is running fine, and what you do when things go wrong.”

“The first part, about preemptive mainte-nance, is suited to a [national] NOC. Which is what we provide as a managed service with private networks – so the network is config-ured and performant. The second is about intervention services, and where to position them. For this, we see three options: these services are owned by the customer, co-lo-cated between the supplier and customer; or provided on-call, like if your boiler breaks.”

He adds: “In the end, the choice depends on the customer’s view of criticality.”

INTERVENTION SERVICESArguably, Vodafone’s three-tier model is or-

War room – Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange all advocate for dedicated private 5G NOC resources (Image: 123rf)

dered funny. The co-location service (num-ber two) puts a Vodafone engineer on-site, as per the Telefónica example, and is geared towards ‘mission critical’ infrastructure – for “making sure systems have the ultimate re-sponsibility, which is more expensive”. The customer-owned support function (one) is for urgent box-replacement work – “a guy in a maintenance shed who can swap a board out if it goes wrong”.

In both these scenarios, the use case dic-tates network downtime and network fixes are time critical. “What you can’t do is have an engineer turn up, whistle through his teeth, and tell you he hasn’t got it on the van. ‘It’s the Pomegranate 900; I’m going to have to call my mate’. The objective is to minimise the recovery time, and the quickest way to do that is to replace the part. That is the philos-ophy – a one-hit fix, every time,” says Skipper.

Where the co-location solution (one) dou-bles and deepens the expertise on site, the on-call setup (three) outsources the work to local third-party technicians, and works where network uptime is measured in miles and not minutes. These second-party (enter-prise-owned; number two) and third-party

CONTIGUITY

CRIT

ICAL

ITY

1

2

3

MNO support staff on site, plus remote

MNO support

Enterprise staff on site, plus remote MNO

support

No engineers on site, MNO sup-port available

remotely

‘co-owned’

‘co-located’

‘on-call’

Vodafone’s three-tier field support model

Phil Skipper, group head of IoT strategy and business development, Vodafone

“The underlying tech doesn’t change; what changes is the way you manage the service.”

11



12

have a stronger play to the enterprise, be-cause they are known to them, and they speak the enterprise language. And they can bring real value.” He mentions Deutsche Tele-kom with T-Systems, American duo AT&T and Verizon; in particular he tells of work Nokia has completed for an unnamed chemical plant with OBS in France.

“OBS really impressed us. Because it knew the business and talked the enterprise lan-guage – instead of just trying to sell a private network. It started with the use cases and ap-plications, and performance and latency re-quirements. We were like, ‘Wow, these guys...’. And it was probably the highest level of re-liability and availability we have ever had to build into a network.”

He cannot say much; the official announce-ment is pending. But he sketches an outline. The pair designed an industrial-grade net-work with three levels of core network re-dundancy, to get to 5x9s (99.999 percent) availability, says Daeuble. This involved two standalone private cores on site, “so if the left side burns the right side functions”, and Or-ange’s public network geared as a last resort to backhaul radio transmissions via a local “co-facility” in case the whole plant goes up.

Meanwhile, the radio setup operates in (at least) two different spectrum ranges: the

(one and three) services are supported re-motely from a central NOC. Vodafone is is-suing augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) gear to walk-through fixes.

Orange, another operator widely credited for its approach to private 5G, is following the same recipe, combining (augmented) central NOC functions with local support services in each market. It describes its approach as “global-local”, with five “major support cen-tres around the world” and “local support where needed”. Support comes from “field services organization and capabilities”, it says.

The firm is targeting medium-to-large mul-tinationals in manufacturing, logistics, and the energy and resources sectors. A spokes-person for Orange Business Services (OBS), its enterprise division, says: “We are adding mobile private network NOC capabilities first in Europe and then in a phased approach to other regions based on demand… In gener-al, low-latency networks can be monitored real-time from a central location. However, based on the situation, it may warrant a local on-site presence to complement the central NOC.”

Specifically, OBS cites computer vision use cases overseeing critical equipment and manufacturing processes. Which seems clear, then: centralised network monitoring and control, supported by localised engi-neering services distributed throughout the edge network. It is not, of course. You only have to look through the various commen-tary across the rest of this magazine to know the market sees elephant traps for operators everywhere.

ULTRA CRITICALITYBut we should reintroduce another voice at this point, one that is playing the mar-ket from all angles. Nokia, despite the noise around its straight-to-enterprise strategy, will work with whoever gets the job done, it says; the governing factors are only about architectural demands, regional availability, and good old customer relationships. “We are completely agnostic,” remarks Daeuble.

Interestingly, he suggests mobile oper-ators with SI-style divisions tend to have grasped the private 5G nettle better. “They

private 2.6 GHz TDD band, reserved by reg-ulator Arcep for enterprises, plus a tranche of public spectrum leased by Orange to the customer locally. This, says Daeuble, created “double-layer coverage” with small cells af-fixed to poles at different angles, a couple of metres apart, in order to get behind each fix-ture and fitting and “make the system avail-able”.

It is a good story. But network design, and indeed most network performance metrics, are mapped out in the early ‘sell’ and ‘build’ phases, as the Nokia story relates, and not in the network management ‘run’. What about ongoing management of this double-cov-erage, triple-redundancy setup? Daeuble says OBS is “babysitting” the network for the client. “Because it is a highly critical network, and if something goes wrong…”

The subtext here, with a chemical plant, is the risk to human life and the natural envi-ronment, as well as to business itself. There is not much more to say on network man-agement at the plant, as yet; there is no word on how OBS is handling it, for instance. But the story says that operators are, indeed, en-gaged in critical-grade private 5G projects from the start, and also trusted with their in-life care, at least in the short term. The jeop-ardy is overplayed, of course.

“OBS really impressed us – it knew the business and talked the talk, instead of just trying

to sell a network. We were like, ‘Wow, these guys...’. It was the highest level of reliability and

availability we have ever had to build into a network.”

Stephane Daeuble, head of enterprise solutions marketing,

Nokia

13


The industrial kaleidoscope has been shak-en, the pieces are in flux, the world is being reordered, to borrow a phrase; snap polls are useful, but inconclusive.

Gergs explains: “Because what we see from discussions with enterprises of varying sizes is that there is a lot of day-dreaming about this whole notion enterprises can do it all themselves. Slowly they are waking up to realise that network management is al-ready complex, and is becoming more com-plex with slicing and other more advanced capabilities.”

More complex? This runs counter to the other persistent narrative in Industry 4.0 circles about complexity being abstracted from traditional macro-sized cellular gear, to the point local-area micro networks run off-the-shelf like plug-and-play enterprise Wi-Fi systems. More potent market dynamics dictate that 5G, especially in stripped-back enterprise setups, will hinge on open radio access networks (open RAN) and ‘cloud-na-tive’ core networks.

Hardware will be standardised and modu-lar, and software will be open and intuitive; more than this, as Appledore says at the top of the piece, the combined network system will be intelligent and automated, to some degree. Which would, logic says, commod-

The Nokia/OBS tale is only anecdo-tal, but it goes against the narrative that says general-purpose public operators are not cut out for high-

stakes industrial networks. A poll from ABI Research suggests just 33 percent of enter-prises are prepared to outsource private 5G management to third parties, and less than half of this number (15 percent of the total) would let mobile operators under the hood. By contrast, two thirds (66 percent) want to keep the run phase in-house.

But these findings, part of its ‘voice of the enterprise’ series, are scrutinised more closely in the webinar session attending this report. The small print notes ABI sur-veyed a cross section of ‘industrial manufac-turers’, which might be perceived to exhibit the most paranoid control-freakery of any above-the-line industrial segment. So the result does not speak for industry, in gener-al. More than this, the question goes wheth-er it just captures a moment in time.

Is there a sense, in fact, that the response might be symptomatic of a market fur-nished with new toys, interested in kicking the tyres and gunning the engines, and imagining different roads ahead? Speaking on the webinar, the answer from Leo Gergs, senior analyst at ABI, is plain. “Yes,” he says.

PART 3 |

Network management – and the rising complexity of hybrid enterprise 5GWhy talk of network building is like a flash of fool’s gold, compared to the complex, perpetual power of private 5G management

“There is a lot of day-dreaming about this notion enterprises can do it all themselves. Theyare waking up to realise thatnetwork management is complex, and getting more so.”Leo Gergs, 5G markets senior analyst,ABI Research

5G managementpreferences

41% 25% 15% 18%

In-house 5Gmanagement

66%

33%

On-prem, enterprise-managed

Third-party MNO

managed

Other third-party managed

Third-party 5G management

In-cloud, enterprise-managed

Source: ABI Research, Voice of the Enterprise


14

Open RAN myth #1 – that anyone can do private 5G

itize the sales process as a box-shifting dis-tribution play – and might just reengage old dealer channels as specialist conduits for SME-geared 4G and 5G systems (as they were, once, for handsets and airtime).

HAYWIRE ARCHITECTURESBut, again, this impacts the sell/build phas-es, as we have discussed them, much more than the network-run. The comment about rising complexity in enterprise 5G systems refers to the challenge of network manage-ment, which exists beyond clever analytics, predictive maintenance, and self-optimiza-tion. Because, as Gergs suggests, the ‘run’ discipline will spiral out of control for telco novices as devices and applications multi-ply in enterprise 5G networks.

He says: “Network management is already complex, and will be even more so as 5G matures, and devices connect and use cas-es change – particularly with Releases 16 and 17 [of the 5G standard], where high reliability and availability come into play. Then it becomes a different ball game. [It] will change [how] enterprises think about it, and there will be a gradual outsourcing, even among enterprises with their own net-work management capabilities.”

Telefónica chips in, here. “Technology is increasingly within the reach of companies and individuals. There is an unstoppable process of technological democratization. Technical barriers are diminishing. What will continue to exist is the barrier of knowledge and the experience of having done it many times before. Telcos know how to manage public or private networks better than any-one else,” comments Carazo.

Nokia has a good vantage point, too. The Wi-Fi comparison, used as a short-hand for the idea of plug-and-play cellular, should be “taken with a pinch of salt” anyway, says Daeuble. It will take some years to get even close, he implies. And the run-side discipline will only go haywire, he concurs. “Most pri-vate networks are running three or four use cases – a dozen, at most. Over time, a facto-ry, say, will have 200 on a single network.”

The widening variety of use cases will bring network slicing into play as a mecha-

nism to allocate differentiated network per-formance against industrial applications, within both standalone private networks and as a function of public infrastructure. “New capabilities mean new complexity.” Daeuble also raises the idea that, despite its bountifulness in certain markets, spectrum is a finite resource, in need of careful man-agement and augmentation.

Most enterprises are not so lucky to work under a regulatory regime that has seen its way clear to annex ‘vertical’ spectrum for industry, and those that are will find their airtime supplies run out. “Only the UK, Ger-many, Japan, plus a few others, have made 100MHz of bandwidth available for 5G. In most countries, you’re lucky to get 20MHz or 40MHz – and you can’t meet [industrial] SLAs with 20MHz of spectrum,” he says.

“Enterprises need more, and they need someone to understand how to squeeze as much as possible, and how to go to the next phase of capacity.” The squeeze is more ur-gent with industrial 5G, he says, because so much hinges on the uplink channel, with sensors sending machine data to some edge-cloud repository; as it stands, the 5G spec has not carried-over the same LTE function to allocate bandwidth away from consumer-style download channels.

Daeuble explains: “Even if you have 100MHz, only a limited amount goes to-

New NOC models – as private 5G network densities spiral upwards and cross into public network slices (Image: 123rf)

A quick rejection of the idea 5G gets simpler for enterprises with open RAN architecture; it doesn’t, says Tadhg Kenny, in

charge of of marketing and partnerships at Druid Software. He explains: “The 5G open RAN ecosystem is getting more complex in some ways, and mobile oper-ators will play an important role to sim-plify it, and provide customers with an ‘out-of-the-box’ experience.”

Kenny goes on: “In 4G, the core (ePC) was connected to the 4G small-cell eNo-deBs and the application layer and cellu-lar devices completed the solution. In 5G, there are many options for the enterprise to navigate – related, say, to where you source or deploy elements of the 5G RAN, like the RIC, CU and DU. Do you centralise them, or deploy them at the edge? Where is the edge? Who do you buy from?”

There’s more, but we’re out of space; this time the 12-inch remix goes online, not in print. Look out for it.

15


have fluffed their lines with every ‘over-the-top’ innovation: cloud storage, digital con-tent, mobile payments, video conferencing.

So much so their digital failures are cli-chéd – so much so it is clichéd just to point their troubles out. But however enterprise cellular is commoditized, and however its supply is democratised, its management appears to be a most familiar and felicitous discipline for mobile operators. The pastime of operating a network is not new for a net-work operator, however it is indexed and ordered. Telecoms is telecoms, after all, and it’s not about to get any easier.

It is time to conclude, and go back to the start. Like Viveros says at IBM, the business of private 5G remains momentarily preoc-cupied with the sale and design of systems; but like most others say in these pages, the real art of private 5G will be in its final man-agement, which will get daubed over the industry canvas in the coming years. Like everyone says – or everyone means anyway – there are roles for everyone else alongside.

As well, like Haysom at Appledore says at the top of the piece, and others say on pag-es 16-18, the instinctive preference among enterprises in many cases will be for self-op-timising 5G systems. But like everyone also knows -- but appears to forget -- there is a long road to go; private 5G will scale in all directions, and the operator community will

wards the uplink – maybe 40MHz at best. Which won’t get you to 1Gbps, as you might expect.” After all the false starts and funny looks, Nokia is again promoting the Multe-Fire standard to explode private cellular into unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum. It has the first-ever MulteFire device in the bag, at last; the LTE-based technology will fill a hole, it says, for spectrum-poor enterprises.

The MulteFire project, convened as a rogue working group outside of 3GPP, has found its way back into the 3GPP agenda, with development of 5G (NR-U) in unli-censed spectrum. The MulteFire Alliance, propped up by Nokia, has rebranded as MFA and redefined its purpose to campaign for ‘universal 5G’ (branded Uni5G) for all – span-ning all kinds of nationally licensed, locally licensed, and shared access bands as well.

MFA is handing out Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) IDs, accredited by the ITU, to identify private networks and authorise devices on them. Suddenly there are – or pretty soon there will be – options for en-terprises to kickstart and augment private cellular projects with alternative spectrum. More than this, of course, the operator com-munity will bring its national infrastructure, variously diced and sliced, to bear on the emerging enterprise space.

EARLY DAYS, FINAL WORDSBack to Vodafone, whose unruffled strat-egy seems to capture just how much the old telecoms set has been written off in the smash-and-grab that has attended the early ‘sell’ and ‘build’ phases of private 5G. “This is a unique time, really, where we have these concentrated spots of [private network] connectivity. But ultimately, it will become more distributed, and go back to what op-erators are doing already today to manage their networks,” remarks Skipper.

Ouch; from an angle, it is like a heavy-weight pro commentating on the qualify-ing rounds in an all-division contest, as new contenders to the telco crown knock seven shades of schadenfreude out of each oth-er. Of course, the new tech-world order is about speed and flexibility, and not brawn. And we have been here before; operators

be positioned to offer a ride to enterprises whichever route they choose.

But Skipper puts it best, and we should handover to him to put a stop to this ramble. “It is not about the build, but about the run. Stringing something together and making it work is fine. But [it is very different to] make sure it delivers the right performance over 10 or 15 years, as the load on the net-work increases, and as internal and external processes are linked together. As a mobile operator, it’s what we do. We run networks, with all the tools and techniques, and the experience to know what to look for.

“But we are at an early stage. If you have multiple customers running private net-works in an industrial region, such as you see in Germany, then, yes, you put your ca-pability closest to your customers. But this thing will morph and change. As the density increases, and as you have distributed pri-vate networks on slices, the [management] will redistribute back into the field. It will wax and wane, based on network density. That will be one of the first drivers.”

He adds: “Managing a multi-functional network with all different tech, from a cen-tralised or distributed NOC, is not what you do if you’re banging out cans of drink. Peo-ple will want to rely on organisations that do it for a living, which is where mobile op-erators have a clear advantage.”

Phil Skipper, group head of IoT strategy and business development, Vodafone Business

“It is not about the ‘build’, but about the ‘run’. It is fine to string something together. [It is different to] make sure it delivers over 10 years, as the load increases and processes are linked together. As a mobile operator, it’s what we do.”


16

‘5G is not a special flower’ – a two-sided tale of telcos’ trouble with enterprises

Want the rest of the market’s view on private 5G manage-ment, and the likelihood that operators will build dedicated

network operations centres (NOC) to serve busy industrial enclaves? Well, here we have four market analysts, and two network pro-viders, to tell the private 5G story from the other side. And it ain’t always pretty for the carrier set.

Do you expect operators to manage the private LTE / 5G networks for enterprises – in most / some cases?

Dean Bubley / Disruptive Analysis: “I can see this in some cases [and some] countries – although mostly in markets where oper-ators have established non-5G enterprise businesses. In the end, it will likely align with their ‘fixed’ connectivity NOCs. Mobile-plus-5G isn’t a special flower.”

Robert Curran / Appledore Research: “The job of running a macro network is com-pletely different from running an enterprise network, even a large one. While operators are focused just on getting 5G up and run-ning, enterprises are more likely to assume the network ‘just works’. For enterprises, the access technology should be invisible. If it needs to be ‘managed’ in the way a telco

understands, then it is probably not ready for enterprise use.”

Bob Gessel / Ericsson: “Management of private networks is a strategic decision for each operator. The deployment scenar-io dictates the model. AT&T is offering on-prem radio and MEC as a commercial [enterprise] solution; meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom’s campus network [offers] differ-ent aspects of on-prem and centralized [cellular and compute], run by Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom, respectively. Others, less experienced with private cellular. are asking for support from vendors to take on delivery and operations. It depends on their appetite for complex enterprise solutions, [and] desire to take operational responsibility. Certain industries may have

SLAs operators are not willing to own; in these cases, vendors and system integra-tors will step in.”

Under what circumstances will operators build dedicated enterprise NOCs to run private 5G networks? When will they manage them from centralised NOCs?

Bubley: “I can imagine this being appealing to very large campus sites like ports and airports that are essentially multi-tenant mini network operators. These might need a dedicated NOC. [Alternatively, there may be opportunities with] public safety and the military, where the operator has a long-term contract, [and] maybe with health authorities and major industrial zones in large countries – such as in the oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico and Texas, [economic zones like] Shenzhen in China, and industri-al heartlands in Germany.”

Curran: “The idea [of local NOCs] runs coun-ter to what telcos talk about all the time: automating so the network manages itself. Operators like Elisa in Finland and Rakuten in Japan are architecting networks to avoid the sort of old-school NOC that telecoms has relied on for decades – because it does not scale well for networks that are con-stantly changing. One of observation about private 5G networks is just how different

“Elisa in Finland and Rakuten in Japan are architecting networks to avoid the sort of old-school NOC that telecoms has relied on for decades – because it does not scale well for networks that are constantly changing. ”Robert Curran, consulting analyst, Appledore research


16

The previous pages make the case for operator-led private 5G man-agement; below, it veers away a little from the same corporate line

17


they are from one another: the physical lay-out, the day-to-day operations. It is difficult to imagine a centralised NOC being able to make much sense of a specific enterprise network.”

Leo Gergs / ABI Research: “It is too early to know whether dedicated NOCs will appear. At the moment, operators aim to support enterprises through existing centralised NOCs… [And] the role of centralised NOCs will become more important with slicing.”

Pablo Tomasi / Omdia: “You can distribute NOCs if the market is ready for private net-works – if there is ‘vertical’ spectrum and a developed ecosystem, educated on private 5G. The idea is the same as with MEC cov-erage zones; operators may need to find a compromise between performance and business opportunity. But they are trying to shift the dynamics away from fully-pri-vate into more traditional territory – into public-network flavoured private networks. They would prefer the enterprise market to go towards hybrid private-public networks.”

Gessel: “Big operators are unlikely to dis-tribute NOCs for private 5G. They may use regional NOCs to be a step closer. Smaller ones have more local engagement, and may gain more appeal in these customer geographies. But big operators want to take advantage of existing infrastructure, particularly if they are deploying private cellular with licensed spectrum. They see this as a cost reduction to avoid separate management systems. Centralised or large regional management is the trend. There are also layers of support ranging from full operations and SLA commitments down to simple performance and fault monitor-ing. There are cases, however, when the operator will want separation between the commercial and private network opera-tions and management.”

Tadhg Kenny / Druid Software: “Mostly, business or mission critical deployments require KPI monitoring in the operator NOC as part of customer SLAs. [But] their [NOC]

model is a centralised one, historically, and they are so far using existing support centres.” What role will system integrators (SIs) play? Will they provide localised network management, rather than operators? If this is the case, what is the role for oper-ators?

Curran: “SIs and consultancies seem more likely to be the primary point of contact with the enterprise. Operators may hold the keys to spectrum in some territories.”

Kenny: “SIs are helping operators deploy and manage these networks, like they do for operators that have always outsourced for macro consumer based coverage – such as for mast, antenna, and DAS installations and maintenance. The role of the operator is to sell the overall private network solu-tion to their enterprise customer base.”

Gessel: “SIs that have network infrastruc-ture and services arms are playing a key role in deploying and operating private networks. They are also leaning on opera-tors and vendors to subcontract – or re-sell – operations and support services. SIs often play key general-contractor roles for the solution. Some customers prefer to work through an SI partner as a single responsi-ble party.”

There is a sense SMEs will outsource management, and large and critical operations will more likely invest in skills and manage their networks in-house. Do you agree?

Curran: “SMEs wanting to outsource makes sense. Larger corporations will have a greater desire for control and ownership, and value the ability to change and adapt quickly – which are, sadly, not characteris-tics commonly associated with telcos.”

Kenny: “Yes; SMEs tend to outsource. Time will tell how big a role operators will play here. There are plenty of operators and SIs

Look who’s talking...

Dean Bubley

Robert Curran

Bob Gessel

Leo Gergs

Pablo Tomasi

Tadhg Kenny

founder, DisruptiveAnalysis

consulting analyst,AppledoreResearch

senior analyst, 5G markets,ABI Research

head of tech strategy & portfolio development,Ericsson

senior vp of marketing & partnerships, Druid Software

prinicpal analyst, private networks,Omdia

17



18

stepping up in countries where spectrum is available to provide similar services – some with neutral host capabilities or as network service providers. [But] we’ve seen large energy providers build up considerable in-house capabilities over the last few years with LTE, and now with 5G.” Gessel: “It is unclear. Smaller, simpler net-works are being designed for self-manage-ment... [and] there is an expectation [SMEs] may prefer this option. For SMEs that already have a strong relationship with operators, then it will [likely] move in that direction. SME engagement in private cellular net-works has been more limited. We see school districts interested with CBRS, with some are leaning on their own staff, some are working with SIs, and others considering operators. Cost is the biggest factor.”

Tomasi: “SMEs are more likely to outsource management, and I see a good opportuni-ty for operators. There are, however, a few caveats. Firstly, few operators have a clear strategy; while all of them talk about SMEs, most of their activity is focused on larger accounts. This could leave it open for other players, such as hyperscalers. Secondly, the type of industry and the size of the SME will affect how operators are perceived, which will impact the opportunity. It is unlikely, for instance, a larger-sized SME running business-critical machinery on a factory floor will see operators as the prime choice. Large enterprises will tend to look to their own resources. But this will evolve and while some will always want to manage the network in-house, others will be out-sourced as their partners build trust.”

Gergs: “It will depend on the enterprise’s capabilities. Large firms will tend to have all of their functionality and support on site. Whereas the SME market, where space is limited and knowhow is limited, will tend to [outsource to] some centralised NOC. There is a question about the role operators will even play with large enterprises. It is going to be fairly limited – certainly with on-site troubleshooting and network support. En-

ment goes, anyone can be an operator?

Bubley: “I don’t think open RAN has much relevance here. It’s more that there’s a whole host of new service providers – from tower companies to cloud companies to critical comms providers – that will be present in the market. There’s scope for operators to differentiate. But they have to work harder.”

Curran: “That is the question. The skill of ‘being an operator’ just isn’t something enterprises see as valuable. That’s the issue. For operators to have relevance, they have to look and behave more like SIs and con-sultancies – and get closer to the customers’ operations, and build solutions business problems. In the end, connectivity is second-ary – important, but not an end in itself.”

Tomasi: “The complexity is hidden, not eliminated. Overall, I see it increasing as the market matures – and this will feed a vicious cycle for new tools and automation. The example is an enterprise deploying networks in different countries, with differ-ent needs. I do not see a market any time soon where private networks are available off-the-shelf – with no need for deploy-ment support, say, or integration.”

terprises want flexibility, which is where the opportunity is. If operators can’t depart from a entral NOC, their chances will be limited. But certain operators are moving away from that very rigid view. Deutsche Telekom, say, allows level-one and -two network support to be handled by the enterprise, on site, and last-line support comes from the operator.”

The Industry 4.0 movements are both working to simplify cellular for enterpris-es, so it works off-the-shelf like Wi-Fi. If complexity is abstracted from the network, what is left for operators – when, the argu-

“The complexity is hidden, not eliminated. Overall, I see it increasing as the market matures – and this will feed a vicious cycle... I do not see a market any time soon where private networks are available off-the-shelf – with no need for support or integration.”

Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst for private networks, Omdia


18

Image: Ericsson

19


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‘We have to assume carriers will evolve to a higher level of analytics’ – Radisys

low, which is pitched to both operators and enterprises. But Radisys is playing the long game, building on experience building radio software for three decades, and on supply arrangements with the likes of Airspan Net-works and Parallel Wireless. “We have only just entered this space… [but] we are confi-dent of becoming well entrenched.”

It has a number of private 5G deals in the works, it says, without giving names. Some are white-label arrangements; one with a Eu-rope-based industrial automation company. The mind boggles, easily. “More than a proof of concept,” is the line from Shenbagaraman. “These customers have two-year roadmaps, at least, and are moving swiftly. The solutions they have today are on Wi-Fi and they want to know how to migrate onto cellular.”

The private 5G software market is bub-bling up; the likes of Athonet, Druid Soft-ware, Quortus, and Metaswitch are all knock-ing about. The market turns on collaboration, apparently, not just competition, especially for newer brands. “There will be a coexist-ence; no one will dominate. We do not see ourselves as a competitor to anyone. We partner with some of them – even if our solu-tions overlap in places, both sides know; it is done in a transparent fashion.”

What about network management, and the Radisys offer to operators and enterpris-es? Now we’re talking, and the whole con-versation is taped below; all answers in the

US-based Radisys, aligned with Indi-an operator Jio, has been looking to repurpose its core LTE product for private implementations since

2018, as a basis to provide a compact 5G core network solution. “We were using our in-house LTE core for private networks. But with 5G, we’ve built everything from the ground-up for private networks,” explains Ganesh Shenbagaraman, head of integrated prod-ucts and ecosystems at the company.

In late 2019, the firm put a private 5G core into an operator lab to simulate a modified version of its network, testing for up to 57 base stations in standalone 5G, with support for throughput of about 20Gbps in the user plane function (UPF). The simulation, it reck-ons, saw it scale its cut-down private 5G foot-print from a few hundred to a few thousand users. “[We created a] low-end network-sys-tem in-a-box,” explains Shenbagaraman.

He says: “This gave us the building blocks for a compact [private] 5G core and RAN net-work strategy, based either on small cells, or a low-end CU/DU architecture – with the radio units coming from customers. It is an all-soft-ware offering… [and] a useful way to go with CBRS deployments in the US, for instance. So, we are moving towards a complete, end-to-end solution, offering the radio and core software, plus the management solution.”

Shenbagaraman gets into some of the minutiae of the management solution be-


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5G core and radio software provider Radisys is new in private 5G, but it is covering ground fast and lending a hand to all sides

“There are practical difficulties even explaining cellular to enterprises. They want it to be as simple as Wi-Fi. So there is a need and demand [for support]… The transition will take years because it is not a simple technology. It will be a transitional of the technology.”Ganesh Shenbagaraman, head of integrated products and ecosystems, Radisys

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following section are from Shenbagaraman.

How do you see the supply-side battle over private 5G? What do you make of the opportunities for mobile operators to pro-vide in-life management of private 5G?“I see it in three layers. At the bottom, enter-prises are making a move into the cellular space. But they are doing so with anxious minds. Because Wi-Fi, despite its flaws, is relatively easy to deploy, and more IT-like. And they have been dealing with Wi-Fi for decades. They are comfortable with Wi-Fi, whether Wi-Fi 6, or anything further. Where-as there are challenges with cellular – with the underlying complexity with the network and spectrum, and even with all the jargon.

“There are practical difficulties even explaining cellular to enterprises. What they want is for the radios and base stations to be as simple and abstracted as Wi-Fi access points. So as a first layer, there is definitely a need, and a robust demand… The transition will take years because it is not a simple technology upgrade. So, it will be a transi-tional understanding of the technology.

“The second dimension is the total cost of ownership (TCO), perceived to be more than with Wi-Fi. There is genuine concern among tech buyers about how much it is going to cost. Which is where operators [can offer] in-frastructure sharing – and make it scale. The win-win is for operators to say to enterprises, ‘Leave the complexity of the 3GPP side, all the radio planning and troubleshooting, and all the integration with IT to me.’

“The ideal scenario is they do those things. And then the enterprises sign contracts that clearly lay out responsibilities about what IT enterprise managers have visibility of, and the kinds of guarantees of security, and all of these things. And the operator-side manag-es the private network like an extension of their infrastructure – beyond what they do in the public network.

“But the third layer is with the hyperscal-ers: Microsoft, Google, Amazon. I am watch-ing with interest, because right now, they are all saying they are here to help the op-erators, providing the cloud infrastructure,

the sophisticated software management orchestration, and cloud instances, and all the strengths a hyperscaler brings in terms of virtualizing and managing everything, and dynamically scaling up and down.

“Today, hyperscalers are engaging with the network vendors too. Nokia, and many of the OEMs, are putting their products in Azure or AWS. So, the vendors are, in a sense, hosting an operator’s network, and also hosting a hyperscaler’s network, as well.”

Explain your managed service proposition for operators and enterprises?“We are looking at all aspects of providing the RAN and core network connectivity. The thing we have realised is the native opera-tors, not the hyperscalers, want to develop these [network management capabilities]. And we bring in the system integration (SI) expertise. They may still need a domain specific SI, but when it comes to the RAN and core network for the wireless piece, we know how to do the end-to-end integration.

“We have done this for IoT devices, and for different types of smartphones, so we bring that. The other thing is edge comput-ing, bringing the necessary workloads and applications to solve specific use cases – for example, analytical use cases where high quality video transfer. We have the portfolio to do that. And sometimes we will partner with a company like Intel to bring in their hardware acceleration for AI and ML. That is at the application level.

“So we are addressing all these three levels: as the connectivity layer provider, as the system integrator, and at the application or code related level. That is how we will play. And we are looking [to engage with] traditional operators. We have a direct rela-tionship with operators in the US, including with MSOs (multiple system operators), ac-quiring CBRS spectrum to become wireless providers. We see future alignment with Jio in India, as well – which can provide some of these aspects from an infrastructure sharing perspective to Radisys.”

If we hop back to the design phase – car-rying into management, too – talk around

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“Operators, not hyperscalers, want to develop [network management capabilities]. We bring the SI expertise. They may still need a domain specific SI, but when it comes to the RAN and core network, we know how to do the end-to-end integration.”Ganesh Shenbagaraman, head of integrated products and ecosystems, Radisys

Image: iStock


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Radisys was acquired in 2018 for $74 million by technology com-pany Jio Platforms, parent of India’s largest mobile network

operator Reliance Jio Infocomm and subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Re-liance Industries. Ganesh Shenbagara-man, the company’s head of integrated products and ecosystems, joins the call from Bangalore, to talk about the telco world’s new fixation on private 5G for enterprises, as a platform to drive in-dustrial change.

But what about India, which hardly gets written about in this context. What is the situation with ‘vertical’ spectrum for Indian enterprises, and how pro-gressive are Indian operators to sublet spectrum for private networks? Shen-bagaraman says there is not much doing at government level, as yet, al-though the company’s engagement with Jio is driving Radisys’ own work around network management, perfor-mance, and automation.

He responds: “India is a little behind on spectrum. The government is still auctioning the remaining LTE bands. Some of the mid-band spectrum, and some parts of millimeter-wave spec-trum at 26 GHz are still being held by government agencies. They are small pockets, but the government is trying to vacate it so an auction can happen next year. But there is now word yet on spectrum for industrial usage.

“The operators spent a whole bunch of money to acquire additional spec-trum, and the country is very densely populated so they are unable to spare any meaningful spectrum. Correctly, it is mainly Wi-Fi and broadband serving enterprises today.”

the kinds of performance SLAs that are going against these private 5G networks?“These are early stages. We have a network services team, a small group attached to a larger group within Jio, which runs the [public] network on a day-to-day basis. We have designed templates about [SLAs] for different-sized private networks – from RF planning to the KPIs to monitor [perfor-mance]... We cannot claim experience from lots of [private network] deployments right now, because there are only two or three places where we are doing this today. But a year down the line, we will be able to talk about how we’ve been doing it, [and] our own unique way.”

Talk about how private 5G NOCs will be organised, and how the support model for enterprise 5G will develop.“Despite the promise, the industry is in the early phase of deployment. This has to be scaled gradually. The same gear that worked for macro public networks cannot be used in private networks – just for cost reasons, mainly. So, when we supply these simpler, lower-power networks, there will [inevitably] be some component failures, and equip-ment issues. Even for well stitched-together solutions, expansion will happen gradually, with a number of learning cycles to know what fails, under what conditions.

“The technology is still – well, it is not that it is immature, but it is not-so institutional-ised to roll out at scale for any particular ver-tical. It has to be a gradual increase – [and it has to be a gradual process to define] mech-anisms to be sure the network is always on, 24/7, and to remediate component failures. In reality [in the early days], there will be a local partner to provide emergency support, which knows the deployment and can go and replace a part if required.”

You mentioned the challenges with the underlying complexity in cellular; but will cellular be as easy as Wi-Fi at some point? Where does that leave operators?“But the operators will change shape as well, by adding more analytics and more sophisticated services. We have to assume

the operators will evolve to a higher level of analytics. There are aspects in the open RAN architecture that make the application of data and analytics possible. Industry specific analytics will bring new value [to enterprise networks], and operators will go beyond just solving basic connectivity problems. Because industrial 5G is not just about networking equipment; it is about benchmarking downtime and maximising the utilisation of equipment.

“If you look at the market over the last decade, the unanswerable question has been how long it will take to make IoT a reality. Because the IoT market has been so fragmented – with so many overlapping technologies. At least there is some con-solidation with 5G. The entry of the hyper-scalers, even though they are disruptive, will lead to consolidation as well, and some benefits for the industry. In five years, the industry will be in a stabler situation. Certain offerings will be well-standardised, like private cellular networks, and easy for the average enterprise to pick up.

“Like with Wi-Fi, where an enterprise IT administrator knows, this is my network, my users, my usage pattern. That level of well-defined choice is not available in the wireless space today. So, in five years, say, enterprises will be able to more easily evaluate what’s available in terms of cost, features, packaging. That will be a real mile-stone for private cellular. But the technology needs to evolve in the meantime.”

And to be clear, when the hardware is easy for enterprises to ‘pick up’, will there be a need for third-party management?“Yes, there will be a need, of course, because many enterprises will choose not to deal with it themselves. They will outsource. If they have 100 private networks in 100 factories in 100 locations, say, and need to manage connectivity between all of those ‘islands’ – and someone has to run all of that. And enterprises won’t, typically. Because the issue of skills remains a concern for enterprises, and they are better off hiring this as-a-service than recruiting expertise themselves.”


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India waits on private 5G

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