Private 5G: The 4 things that determine if you need it
By this time, you’ve probably read so many stories about enterprises adopting private 5G networks that you feel like a student who finds out they’re not one of the cool kids. Can you ever hold your head up in a tech conference and admit you’re not running private 5G yet?
Take heart! Maybe you’re not supposed to be. The best wireless network technology for an enterprise depends on four things: devices, spread, privacy, and mission.
5G is a cellular network technology used almost exclusively by telcos, but you can buy equipment to build your own 5G network, and even get hosted 5G from cloud providers like Amazon. You can use open spectrum so you don’t need to bid at an auction for a license. There’s a lot of excitement about private 5G, but in that excitement it’s easy to forget that you could have adopted private 4G/LTE long ago, and that Wi-Fi is still the most popular wireless technology of all. You’ve got to look at the four factors just mentioned to decide whether you want to read about private 5G or adopt it.