Council Post: How Private 5G Adoption And Connectivity Are Paving The Way For Digital Transformation

Brian Bronson, President of Americas and APAC, Capgemini Engineering.

5G is essential to virtually every industry because the bulk of our economy is tied to digital transformation and relies on wireless networks—particularly edge technologies. Earlier in the year, I reflected on what I thought would be the biggest trends in smart technology for 2022, and 5G was at the top of my list.

But 5G adoption isn’t a trend that telecommunications experts alone are paying attention to. Rather, its impact is having far-reaching implications across industries. For example, in healthcare, 5G connectivity between critical medical devices allows for important communication about test results and scans, providing improved critical care to people around the world. In the auto industry, it provides vehicles with enhanced technologies for the best in-car entertainment, as well as enabling autonomous driving. One might even consider the intersection between these two dynamic industries, where new 5G technology enables remote ambulances to track routes and run offsite diagnostics, providing patients with the necessary care in a streamlined manner.

A major trend impacting industries goes one step further with the adoption and connectivity of private 5G. As more businesses that can create their own private networks emerge—rather than sharing networks across the public domain—companies will be more likely to be able to strategically manage these networks, personalize them and improve their overall business models.

How Private 5G Adoption Is Becoming A Reality

It’s widely known that private 5G has significant potential for all industries—from education to healthcare to utilities. In fact, 76% of manufacturers plan to adopt private 5G by 2024, signifying that strides are being made to equip enterprises with the right infrastructure to successfully operate private 5G networks. Many industry leaders are actively invested while multivendor solutions enabled by hyperscalers continue to make noise.

However, although many sectors are on the road to adoption, they’ll need to overcome several challenges before this technology can be fully realized. For starters, private 5G networks can be complex to manage, meaning that enterprises looking to move forward on their journey will likely have to partner closely with service providers to meet their end goal. Other challenges vary from their cost to security to the wide learning gap that exists for talent attempting to learn new tools.

Despite these challenges, I believe private 5G adoption will continue to grow and become a reality. Specifically in the U.S., the FCC has made the 5G spectrum in the mid-band available for enterprises to license and test the waters of private networks. As efforts such as this continue, the push toward 5G will become a more tangible reality.

Private 5G In Focus: The Utility Sector

A great example of an industry reaping the benefits of private 5G is the utilities sector. Utilities fall under critical infrastructure, require low latency and secure control and there is significant growing traction in this market. In other words, utilities are seeing more and more potential in creating their own Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) private network and gaining first mover advantage in creating the “utility of the future.”

This will take time, but with the help of strategic partners, such as a communications service provider (CSP) and others, the utilities sector could reap benefits from using private 5G services. This can be expressed through its potential use cases, including the ability to expand and provide mobile connectivity in large rural areas, enabling employees to closely monitor service disruption, provide remote assistance, upgrade services and manage their company workflow and facilities. Additionally, consumers could monitor and optimize their energy consumption, giving them the opportunity to lower their bills while pushing toward a more sustainable future.

5G Use In Other Sectors

Beyond the utilities industry, many of the core capabilities enabled by 5G—increased reliability, monitoring, real-time operations and predictive maintenance, which can improve the quality of service and help avoid major service disruptions—are also core requisites in the manufacturing industry, consumer packaged goods and retail markets and the education sector.

• Manufacturing: 5G can breathe new life into aged machinery by enabling industrial wireless devices, creating a digital twin of the machine and continuously monitoring productivity on a real-time basis. This can allow manufacturers to anticipate servicing and avoid the cost of cabling these machines in order to bring them onto the network.
• Consumer Packaged Goods And Retail: 5G enables an augmented reality (AR) shopping experience, which can improve the customer’s retail customer journey.
• Education: 5G can enable instructors to seamlessly teach courses to remote students, helping streamline logistics and thereby improving the quality of the student experience.

As industries continue to overlap and intersect, what becomes a beneficial use case of 5G for one has the potential to become beneficial for all. 5G has far-reaching implications in most, if not all, sectors operating today. This reach is what excites me about the potential of private 5G.

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