This post originally appeared in September 2023 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)
File this one under “high quality problems”! We’re
starting to see a trend towards multiple enterprise private 5G networks
on the same site, or very close to each other. That has a lot of
implications.Various large campus-style environments such as
ports, airports and maybe business parks, industrial zones and others in
future, will need to deal with the coexistence of several
company-specific #5G networks. For
instance, an airport might have different networks deployed at the
gates for aircraft turnaround, in the baggage-handling area for
machinery, across the ramp area for vehicles, in the terminals for
neutral host access, and in maintenance hangars for IoT and AR/VR. Importantly,
these may be deployed, owned and run by *different* companies – the
airport authority, airlines, baggage handlers and a contracted indoor
service provider, perhaps. In addition there could be other nearby
private networks outside the airport fence, for hotels, warehouses and
car parks.This is something I speculated about a few years ago
(I dug out the slide below from early 2020), but it is now starting to
become a reality.This is likely to need some clever coordination in terms of #spectrum
management, as well as other issues such as roaming/interconnect and
perhaps numbering resources such as MNC codes as well. It may need new
forms of #neutralhost or multi-tenant setups. Yesterday I attended a workshop run by the UK’s UK Spectrum Policy Forum.
While the main focus was on the 3.8-4.2GHz band and was under Chatham
House rule (so I can’t cover the specifics), one speaker has allowed me
to discuss his comments directly. Koen Mioulet from European private network association EUWENA
gave an example of the Port of Rotterdam, which has 5 different
terminals, 3000 businesses including large facilities run by 28
different chemical companies. It already has two #PrivateLTE
networks, and 5G used on a “container exchange route” for vehickes,
plus more possible networks on ships themselves. It is quite possible to
imagine 10+ overlapping networks in future. While the UK has
400MHz potentially available in 3.8-4.2GHz, some countries only have
50-100MHz for P5G. That would pose significant coordination challenges
and may necessitate an “umbrella” network run by (in this case) the Port
Authority or similar organisation. An added complexity is
synchronisation, especially if each network is set up for different
uplink/downlink splits for specific applications.MNOs could be
involved too, in roles from wholesale provision, down to just spectrum
leasing. Whatever happens, regulators and others need to start thinking
about this.In the past I’ve half-jokingly suggested that a new
6G target metric should be to have “1000 networks per sq km” rather than
the usual “million devices per sq km” or similar. Maybe we
should start with 10 or 100 nearby networks, but that joke is now
looking like a real problem, albeit a healthy one for the private
cellular industry.