A couple of points from a conversation last week with Verizon Business about private 5G, ahead of a big report and webinar next month on how private 5G scales in Industry 4.0: the first is that the process is easier, suddenly; the second is that it is really difficult, still. Hardly revelatory, right? Because private 5G, as a piece of technology, is not new, anymore, and ‘industrial revolution’, as a product of technology (plus vision, courage, money, luck), is not quick. History tells us that much; and, if it doesn’t, it will be an epic watch, anyway – as the AI industry butts-up to practically every other industry on the planet, like an unstoppable force meeting with an immovable object.
But Verizon Business is clear, and even more forceful-sounding than it was six months ago, when it first presented its ‘land-and-expand’ strategy in these pages, and counted-off an expansive bunch of sales victories with different-sized clients in different-style markets, home and abroad. Jennifer Artley, in charge of its so-called ‘5G acceleration’ team, races through the highlights reel, pointing to a record month in July, before summer broke, and a busier sales calendar than a year ago. “We’re 40 percent in our funnel,” she says. Again, there is no base reference, and the business, in its revamped form, is still new; but the firm is landing-and-expanding more and faster, the message goes.
“We’re doing great; business is great,” she says. “We have a lot of momentum coming from neutral-host [sales], as well – which we only launched in April. So yes, we continue to land-and-expand, and we can flex up and we can flex down to support larger and smaller deployments.” She references the same unnamed pharmaceutical company as last time, which returned to Verizon Business with a “more complex brief” just a couple of months after taking receipt of its first private 4G/5G setup; that work is now in process, it seems. “The second deal is for one site, one campus; but it has 55 buildings” she says. “So we’re not just expanding one contract to another; it’s a whole other level.”
She goes on: “These deployments are not all created equal, right? The complexity is significant. We’ve been working to create a degree of modularity in terms of how we sell and how we deploy – such that we can deal with the uniqueness of any given campus while sticking to a core [offer] – in terms of what we’re selling and supporting. Which, to an extent, is about knowing you need X number of radios and Y number of cores to cover a square-footage of Z. But we also don’t have the secret sauce; we have more secret sauce than six months ago. But it’s an evolution; we are trying to incorporate [what we learn] into how we sell and how we deploy.”
Which gets into this discussion about how to make a smartly generic proposition out of an inherently bespoke solution in the name of scalability – as the upcoming report / webinar will explore. But while the technology offer is somehow simplified, and also divided and multiplied in more targeted products (in order to “flex up and down”), the enterprise sector is not hanging about. IT departments – in certain enterprises in certain industries – are making lighter work, suddenly, of the business case to turn speculative pilots into commercial projects into operational practices – and then into multiple deployments in multiple venues. Which is the scale story, right there – among bolder enterprises.
Artley says: “What we’re seeing is that customers are not even waiting until the systems are fully deployed before they’re placing their second, third, fourth orders – or expanding to second, third, fourth locations. Which is exciting because it shows the [enterprise] market believes in the power of private networks – and that we can help them to get the outcomes they’re looking for. Customers go into the conversation with one or two use cases in mind, and, once [they’re] deployed, believe they can quickly amplify to seven, eight, or nine use cases – and so the return becomes evident very quickly. It feels like the technology is being accepted by the market.”
So it’s all-good, then, as per the first point about how sales are getting easier; except there is a snag, as per the second. “Yeah, the market is coming along – probably not as fast as we would like, but it is definitely going in the right direction,” says Artley. And there it is; that long hype shadow, so familiar in the technology sector, and so quickly shortened in the coal-face complexity of commercial integration, and so quickly dispersed in the fractured prism of Industry 4.0. Private 5G sales remain scattered in the broader industrial landscape, and within deeper industrial solutions; but familiarity with the technology, plus bolder transformation strategies, spurred by AI, are combining well.
Artley says the rising confidence in private 5G is because of these things. “Familiarity and experience are part of it; and customers know the limits of Wi-Fi, and see the performance of 5G, and their confidence grows. But some companies are just more progressive; they want to be on that next wave of technology solutions – for the next wave of business challenges. Private 5G helps with that… [and] the enthusiasm for AI has also underscored the importance of operational readiness. Everyone is worried about how to maximize the opportunity. Customers have been applying AI for years; but generative AI [is new and] will be critical for business growth in most industries.”
Artley is flanked on the call by Erich Trautman, senior director in the ‘5G acceleration’ team at Verizon Business; he introduces the idea, as well, that momentum has built because of ageing digital antenna system (DAS) equipment. “The thing we didn’t account for, actually, is that we were positioning [private network and neutral-host systems] at a time when a lot of DAS gear was being retired,” he says. “I mean, DAS is radio intensive and expensive, and turns on five or 10 year cycles. And we were having all these conversations about solving concrete factory-floor problems, and customers were saying, ‘but you’re Verizon; you can just extend your macro network’. Which is right.”
He goes on: “So as we’re talking about [private 5G] radios in factories, the conversation turned to neutral-host systems, to extend coverage of other providers as well – which got us into hard-wood and carpeted environments. The other thing was the [value of licensed spectrum] was being proved-out in the market. Because as well as issues with Wi-Fi propagation, [enterprises were] seeing real limitations with CBRS, domestically – as this budget (‘lightly’ licensed) spectrum option. So were these two sort-of injections of growth which fundamentally changed our growth trajectory – from this turnover of DAS infrastructure, and from this recognition of the value of licensed spectrum.”
So the narrative flips back to the first point again, about reasons-to-be-cheerful about growth with private 5G (and neutral host) systems. Trautman talks-up progress with 5G/IT integration, too, particularly in straighter IT-led enterprise environments – but even as IT departments in OT-led Industry 4.0 firms have requested since forever. “The future is to make 5G work for IT teams – so cellular has the same sorts of device management and active directory integration they get from their Wi-Fi network. That’s why they love Wi-Fi – because user administration and policy is easy. And the hardwood and carpeted versions of our enterprise 5G offerings expose those capabilities.”
The narrative flips both ways with Trautman, too – about the big complex industrial backdrop for all of this private 5G positivity. Private cellular integration with IT, also supporting IT integration with OT, is a gnarly topic, which requires further work. “You’re right to characterise it as a journey,” responds Trautman. The discipline in the first instance is to retain the innate transmission and security characteristics of cellular, but to bring its administration functions into the IT realm; the solution in the second, says Trautman, is about APIs – as per the new multi-operator joint venture with Ericsson, various GSMA projects, and a whole lot of talk. “We’re really talking about three little letters, A, P, and I.”
He goes on: “We create consoles for customers to manage their private wireless and neutral host networks, with APIs that interact with Microsoft for active directory, say, and with Juniper and others for endpoint management and user or policy management.” The point is to provide an alternative IT console where enterprise IT staff can control all of their wireless devices; but it sounds like a one-way street, essentially, where an IT-like 5G console can be used to manage sundry wireless devices, but not vice versa. No matter, the sense is there is real progress, but also real work to do. To illustrate, Trautman tells of his company’s work with a “German auto manufacturer”, probably Audi.
“They were very clear that, while they appreciated all we’d done to prototype and test cars on the track, that IT-integration was really valuable. And we’ve worked diligently since then, for 12 or 18 months, and we have meaningful proofs and working trials. But like everywhere, an IT department is a complex organism that operates multitudes of platforms. So yes, it would be unwise to say this is bang-on and works all the time. But it is a capability that we are building with partners. Integration is always a journey. But the network has to provide value beyond just connectivity, and beyond use cases; it has to move into the IT space to be adopted at the rate that we expect it to.”
Which, again, sounds like the last word on scale: miles on the clock and gas in the tank, but lots of road left to travel. The conversation goes way deeper into in-house enterprise IT/OT politics, which is becoming simpler, says Verizon Business – but is intractable, say others, interviewed separately for the upcoming report (the discussion will run free there). But the final word goes to Artley, actually, who neatly captures both points at once. “These are big decisions for enterprises, and the first conversation always starts with, ‘but why?’ Because they have Wi-Fi 6 and are thinking about Wi Fi 7. So it’s a long conversation, and every company goes at its own pace, right?”
There are speed limits in Industry 4.0 – in other words.
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