5G private network, or a network slice?

If you’re a business just starting on your journey to unwire your facility — be that a busy factory or a carpeted office — you may be wondering how best to do that. Just use the public 4G or 5G network, use a separate private network, or attach to a mobile operator’s 5G network slice?

Fierce wondered the same recently as we shuttled around downtown Boston between Ericsson and Verizon conferences. 

Both 5G network slicing and 5G private networking use standalone 5G. The standalone 5G slicing capability allows an operator to create multiple virtual networks on top of its pure 5G infrastructure. This can allow an operator to create separate network streams with an allocated bandwidth amount for customers like broadcasters and enterprises.

Network slicing requires the public network to support standalone capabilities to operate. A business can create its own standalone network with a separate private 5G network.

In the United States, network slicing is slowly starting to emerge from beta as a prospect for enterprises, largely for select broadcasters, enterprises and sports teams. But 5G network slicing is already common in China and is emerging in India. 

So Fierce thought it would be interesting to ask Ericsson and Verizon about whether enterprises would choose private networking or network slicing for enterprise tasks and applications.

Surprise! The operator and vendor both said that for 4G or 5G they prefer private networking for enterprise applications. However, we think we may have got a different response from a Chinese operator on this, and we definitely would have a different answer from an Indian operator like Jio, which started to offer 5G network slicing in the first quarter of 2024, ahead of rolling out 5G private networking.

Operator overview

Mike Caralis, VP of business markets at Verizon, told us in Boston that he thinks that private networks are — and will remain — a big business even as network slicing comes online. 

“When you have a private network, a customer wants very much 100% control of that network,” Caralis said. He noted that an enterprise customer can even configure network slices on their own 5G private network — because it is a self-contained standalone network — and add in additional security and other features.

Of course, private networks are currently a booming business for Verizon. “We sold more private networks in the first quarter of this year than we sold in prior year,” Caralis noted.

That doesn’t mean that he discounts network slicing as a feature. Noting that Verizon has now rolled out standalone 5G in several states, Caralis said that network slicing will allow the operator to offer “bit rate control” over the public network to customers, through the use of a virtual slice. Still, that’s probably more interesting to gamers than accountants or sales people at an enterprise.

Vendor viewpoint

Ericsson is also hot on the private network business. Huawei leads as a private network vendor, followed by Nokia and then Ericsson. The Swedish vendor, however, has just launched new private radio products aimed at closing the gap.

Peter Linder, head of thought leadership at Ericsson North America said that the company is still figuring out how to sell network slices as they finally become available to a wider population. He said that the industry needs to adopt the road model —think bike lanes, bus lanes and car lanes — for network slicing. 

That, however, is still in the future for Ericsson. The back half of this year will be focused on selling its Ericsson enterprise private networking gear.

The analyst angle

“I think private 5G is being considered by the enterprises based on different criteria — they want private, controlled, reliable and good [quality of service],” Roy Chua, principal analyst at AvidThink, said in an email to Fierce. “Network slices of a public network may not provide the coverage needed indoors or in rural areas that carriers have no incentives to cover (oil and gas fields, mines, agricultural farmland etc.),” he added.

“Many early private 5G use cases are related to Industry 4.0 use cases, which favor tight coupling with the application infrastructure (control and monitoring systems, surveillance systems, etc.), and for which customers like stronger isolation and security,” Chua concluded.