Private 5G networks are about to be the hottest game in town- with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47.5% from 2022 to 2030. These are like public networks in many ways, but instead of sharing resources and bandwidth with others, these are dedicated networks purpose-built by, or for, businesses or organisations. The benefit is that they gain full control and ownership to help guarantee availability, security, and performance.
Benefits of Private 5G
While 4G-powered private networks have been around for some time, the introduction of 5G promises valuable new benefits that set it apart. These include greater security, reliability, speed, and lower latency. And thanks to its mobile nature, 5G private networks are especially attractive for handling indoor and outdoor applications and services that wired connections and even most Wi-Fi can’t address, such as college campus settings, or industries like mining, agriculture, and oil and gas. Private 5G is also attractive to government agencies and public safety services due to its added security and reliability.
The Factory of the Future
As an example, let’s look at the 5G factory of the future. A private 5G factory network, thanks to its lower latency, could control a fleet of autonomously guided vehicles (AGV) that move across a factory floor – and even into outdoor spaces – automatically restocking shelves and tirelessly loading boxes into shipping containers around the clock. 5G can also support virtual or augmented reality applications for inspecting items on a production line. In addition, with more bandwidth comes the ability to connect exponentially more devices – which means each piece of inventory can be tracked as it moves through every stage of the production process. Information gleaned and analyzed from all these sensors will create a fully connected smart factory that automatically tracks, analyzes, and adjusts its operations in real-time – resulting in improved productivity, greater efficiencies, and lower costs.
Service Assurance Takes Center Stage
What happens when the assembly line stops or slows because the network malfunctions, or the sensors stop responding? All this automation makes service assurance every bit as important as the network itself. Added complexity creates more avenues for risk and failure – and with so many moving parts, it becomes physically impossible to track everything manually. The right service assurance solution will help identify issues and enable automated corrective actions.
The ability to track and measure high volumes of events and filter and correlate them in real-time will be what allows business and IT executives to sleep well at night, knowing that things are running smoothly. And when problems do occur –that there are systems in place to predict, detect, and mitigate network issues before they even happen. Factory executives want to know that their assembly lines are operating properly, hospitals need to know if their smart medical devices are receiving and transmitting data reliably, and farmers want their connected tractors to deliver the right fertiliser to the right crops at the right time.
Since real world private networks will include a mix of networking like 4G, 5G, and traditional fibre-based technologies, along with various hardware, software, and spectrum – an easily deployable service assurance solution that can manage hybrid network complexity is also a must. But these aren’t the only considerations.
Below are five requirements that businesses to need to be aware of when selecting a service assurance solution to help manage their private network and ensure success:
Top 5 Requirements for 5G Private Network Service Assurance:
- Deep device discovery for automated and real time representations of network events and accurate representations of network inventory and topology.
- Rapid ability to determine the root-cause of problems in hybrid network environments.
- Tools to immediately identify the services & customers impacted by network issues.
- Ability to deliver high-value problem notifications to external systems (for faster resolutions) or automated actions.
- Executive dashboards to answer the question: “How’s my business running?”
5G technologies, services and applications are still evolving – and customer expectations are high. While private 5G networks promise to deliver better speeds and ultra-low latency to allow more advanced use cases like video analytics, robotics, digital twins, and industrial AR and VR, success won’t be measured by the ‘speeds and feeds,’ but by the user experience. Having the right tools in place to manage the unique demands of 5G private networks needs to be a top priority.
Enghouse delivers proven service assurance solutions that are deployed in private networks around the world – including to mission-critical environments like railways and first-responders. Enghouse solutions provide organisations with a service-based view that maps and correlates the network to the topology while helping engineers to pinpoint service-impacting alarms and discover the root cause in real-time. Our solutions have the ability to integrate across multi-generational, multi-vendor, multi-technology networks, which is especially important when managing the growing pains associated with the constant change and complexity of today’s hybrid networks.
