5G Private Networks, for Enterprises
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Session Abstract:
A private 5G network gives companies the ability to customize the network according to specific organizational needs and locations, securely, and on their timetable. A private 5G network allows large enterprise and public sector customers to bring a custom-tailored 5G experience to indoor or outdoor facilities where high-speed, high-capacity and low-latency connectivity is crucial, regardless of whether or not the premises is within a public 5G coverage area. Joining us are Pari Bajpay, VP of Business Products at Verizon Business and David Kim, Director for the Networks Business at Samsung Electronics America.
Executive Speakers:
Pari Bajpay - VP of Business Products, Verizon Business
David Kim - Director for the Networks Business, Samsung Electronics America
Transcription
Abe: A private 5G network gives companies the ability to customize the network, according to specific organizational needs and locations, securely and on their timetable. A private 5g network allows large enterprise and public sector customers to bring custom-tailored 5g experience to indoor or outdoor facilities or high speed, high capacity and low latency connectivity is crucial, that's regardless of whether or not the premises is within a public 5g coverage area. Joining us on today's discussion are Perry Bajpay, he's vice president of business products at Verizon Business. And we also have David Kim, director for the networks business at Samsung Electronics America and gentlemen, welcome.
David: Thank you.
Pari: Thank you Abe.
Abe: Well, thanks for being here. We've talked about 5g private networks for a couple of years now. We want to drill down a little bit here. I'm going to start sort of at a high level Perry, and I'll start with you, if you don't mind. What's involved for private networks when really being transformed into a private 5g network to meet these specific needs of enterprises?
Pari: That's a great question Abe. Look, we all know industries are evolving and they're evolving fast and there's a strong push towards digital transformation. And as that happens, there's a lot of focus on robotics and automation and AI machine learning, driven analytics. And one thing is for sure, there's ubiquitous connectivity. There's a big need for ubiquitous connectivity. And with that, we are seeing a great boom in IoT devices being deployed and sensors being deployed across the customer's locations. And the customers are looking for flexibility of deployment of these devices. Mostly a lot of them are untethered increasingly.
As you can imagine, these devices are chatty, they're generating a lot of data and that data needs to be processed very quickly. So decisions can be made. Customers are also looking for data sovereignty, that data needs to be contained. Now having said all that, customers have made a lot of investments. They have legacy investments that they have made and they want to protect it. They don't want to get rid of all of that. So they want to kind of bring that along, yet they want a scalable path forward with all the flexibility and so on that you mentioned, and I just talked about as well.
So what's really imperative here for us is to work closely with the customer to understand their business needs and their use cases, but essentially really supported by a network that meets their needs. The network has to be flexible, should be scalable, should be secure, easy to manage. A lot of parameters out there needs to be easy to manage and augmented with more and more AI machine, driven insights. And you think about AI machine learning driven insights, it's not just across the network. Think about what the customer has deployed. You got devices, you got network, you probably have an edge compute environment. You have applications, solutions, the ability to manage them end to end together. That's what the customer is really looking for that we have seen in our work with our customers.
Abe: And David, as far as 5g private network supporting enterprises, anything to add?
David: Yeah, to Perry's point. Really the first decision enterprises really have to make is to his point, how do you manage it? And do you build it, or do you receive a managed solution and have somebody else manage it for you? Another major decision that enterprise really have to make is around what stays on their Wi-Fi, what stays public and what really will reside on the private network. And so, yeah, absolutely. From an application perspective and devices, there's a, a massive need for not only public coverage, but you find that there is also that underlying need for private coverage and to be able to extract value from that data that's being created from those devices.
Pari: Yeah. And I just wanted to add to what David was saying. I think it's a really good point. Customers do have the ability to get things in piece, piece parts, [04:48 hello] devices and network and compute environment separately and their solutions. But as I was saying earlier, customers would be a lot happier if they have a partner that can bring all of these things together and really create this managed environment. So the customer doesn't have to deal with all the details there, kind of, they see an end-to-end environment managed by a partner.
Abe: So Perry, if you don't mind, I'm going to stick with you. I want to talk about and drill down a little bit on some of the use cases for private 5g network. So what are some of these benefits of a private 5g network in the following use cases and not exclusive to anyone, just want to throw some out [05:36 inaudible]. Smart factories, venues, both public and private or medical services.
Pari: Really good point. I think you pointed out really good areas, verticals, the way we see it. 5g has a lot of benefits. We talked about ultra-low latency and you think about a factory floor. All these sensors that are being deployed, when that data gets generated, that data needs to be transported very quickly. Think about latency that is sub 10 millisecond, you're thinking 4, 5, 6 millisecond latency. You want that data to be transported and processed really fast.
And ideally when you have an environment like that, you want to have a compute environment. Compute and storage environment that is also local at that point. So that data can be transported quickly to a compute environment where the application resides, where decisions can be made rapidly. And now you can take action. So when you think about automation on a factory floor, that data comes in, gets processed, decisions made. Now you can act really fast with this automation. That's what the customers are looking for, thats we have seen.
And then of course the ability to scale, scalability is important. I mean we are in a very high device dense, rich environment. And you're looking for consistent performance. So you want the ability to have a device dense environment, the ability to have consistent performance across these devices, because you have SLAs that you want to be able to manage. So VC, 5g is ideal for that. Of course, security, you want that data to be secure. You want flexibility of deployment. You want reliability as we talked about.
So again, these are some of the things. And then as David mentioned earlier the ability to support on-premise and off-premise environments. So seamlessly think about a factory floor again, you have trucks that are coming in that are loading. You want to be managing that with a private 5g environment. All the inventory management that's happening, but then that fleet, that truck leaves the factory floor. Now you want to have fleet management takeover, you want seamless handoff, seamless interaction between, on-prem on campus and off-prem use cases.
So those are some of the things that you can do, private 5g working with public 5g. Those are good examples of areas where you could see that happen on a factory floor. Now think about AMRs, robots. So you can imagine a factory floor where you have robots. AMR, AGVs that need to navigate the factory floor. There are humans there too. You want the AGV to be smart. You want to not have accidents, stuff like that. So you want the ability to easily navigate across it. And again, quick decision-making is also important there. So those are the kinds of things we see.
We see a lot of need for computer vision-driven use cases, think about quality assurance, think about just monitoring devices, leveraging computer vision. So we've seen a lot of those deployments out there, too. And if you now extrapolate that, think of medical services, the secure transport of patient data. You want to have real-time assisted diagnostics, robotic remote, surgery type procedures.
All of these require the ability to transport that data securely with good performance, consistent performance and then the ability to process that data in a nice edge compute environment. And that's really what we are seeing a lot of. Now expand that to venues. Now you can think about smart venues, turning venues into smart venues as the fans arrive, right from parking, parking availability, as they enter the venue, accelerated access. How do they enter the venue, quickly. You want E-tearing of the tickets, those kinds of things.
As they come in they want to have crowd management capabilities. So again, these are the types of things that the smart venue operators will be looking for. There's a lot of AR VR type applications that you see and so on. So we have several examples across different market verticals, but we see these are ideal areas where you can see 5g being deployed assisted with edge compute environment.
Abe: So David, from Samsung's perspective private 5g use cases.
David: Well, Perry covered a lot of the cool stuff. So maybe I should take a step back and cover more of the boring stuff. From what I've seen there are, and by the way, every private network has different requirements and different use cases. And so a lot of this is tailored for what a specific enterprise might need. But one joining factor I think that a lot of what we've seen across the board is monitoring of assets. And we've seen instances and interest in different mixes of bands to support these different use cases, but these monitoring of assets from a perspective of cost saving. So I think Perry covered a lot of these use cases where that can be monetized, whereas from a cost saving perspective monitoring heavy machinery.
I mean even sensors, attached to cows for instance. I mean, just use your imagination, there are a number of sensors across the market that can be connected to a network and provide like we mentioned earlier, a massive amount of data that actually can provide a lot of interesting insights.
And so I think that's the true power of 5g in a lot of these use cases. So, for instance from the medical perspective, if you can imagine medical equipment that might have to travel from room to room to room and they don't want to lose those valuable assets. And so that's also a use case that we've seen. Telehealth would not be possible if you don't have at least a hundred megabit per second speeds. And obviously, if you want to have higher quality video, you would even need more than that.
And year after year, we seem to be pushing the boundaries of what's required and what the baseline need for a wireless network is. So we talked about scalability as well, and that's also a big part of it, in that you should be able to add be it IoT assets or asset tracking as much as you need to in your private network.
Abe: Perry, before I move on, anything to add?
Pari: Yeah. And I think just to add to what David just said, he talked about legacy investments. David mentioned Wi-Fi and so on. Look, customers are going to have an environment where they have different legacy environments already built out. They've probably made some big investments. They want to carry that forward. I know I mentioned that earlier. I think that's really important that the ability to really have a multi access environment would be something that the customer may be looking for.
So I think that's something that's important. And so when you think of a private 5g environment, typically you think about a pure private 5g environment. I'm just saying that would be of course 5g for all the things that David just talked about. But also legacy environments kind of getting baked in there. So you have a path forward. So new deployments could be 5g enabled, existing deployments, could also be brought forward.
Abe: So Perry, I'm going to stick with you. And again, we've talked about this a number of times, specifically between you and I actually, the challenges around private 5g, specifically for enterprises. Let me ask you in this way, have those challenges changed at all, let's say from a year ago in any drastic way, could you give us sort of an example?
Pari: And thank you Abe for that. Yes. We had talked I think it was late last year. 5g enabled device ecosystem, that's something that we had touched upon the last time. That has evolved, and that is evolving really, really fast. If you are thinking of a private 5g environment, of course you want devices to connect to and you want those devices to be 5g enabled devices. So you don't require gateways and the sort and so there's a tremendous movement in the industry, in terms of 5g enabled devices becoming available and that's happening fast. And I see that really progressing really well. So where we are at now is a whole lot better than where we were last year and you see that improving throughout this year going into next year.
So I think that was one key area that we had touched upon. Scalability was the other one. You think about a lot of customers want to start small. Potentially they want to try this out. And then they want the ability to scale it out. So you start with one factory floor, one venue, one retail store, whatever. And then you want to expand that to a national footprint let's say. So you want the ability, or even within the factory floor, you want to start with one area and then you want to expand to other areas of the factory. So you want a scalable path. So the ability to start small and then add more and more and more devices to it, that's something that is what the customers are looking for.
I think you'll see our options improving over time in that space as well. And then the third one, I think we touched upon a bit earlier, which was end to end manage services. Customers could potentially assemble piece parts together, but ideally they're looking for a partner who could bring it all together. And you'll see that also evolving the ability to manage as David talked about, performance reports, performance management of these devices, you'll see a lot more AI machine learning getting into it and the ability to assist the customers.
So you don't have to figure out all these moving parts, you'd have ML kind of help you with it and also deployment of workloads. What workloads should be deployed where? Assisted by 5g, but what workloads get deployed in which environment, you'll see a lot of ML getting in that.
Abe: David, again, from Samsung's perspective, challenges for enterprises in the 5g private network space.
David: Combining technologies from multiple vendors requires intense integration and testing, and it can be a daunting task to assemble several vendors to test out and ensure a high level of usability for whatever use case you're trying to solve for. And so to that point, not everyone operates a lab. So, taking advantage of the pre-integration work that Samsung and Verizon have done, can really simplify getting a solution in place very quickly.
Pari: And I just wanted to add to what David just said, that is really, really important. And then the other part of it is having a platform that bring things together is really important there too. Because you think about network and edge compute and a device ecosystem, as we talk about a lot of data kind of coming out, how do you manage it end to end as I touched upon it also, having a platform that allows onboarding and therefore testing as well to David's point would become really, really important in this space as well.
Abe: So, David, I'm going to go back to you. I want to talk about spectrum. So how is spectrum really opening up these new opportunities for enterprises regarding what type of enterprise would need, let's say a CBRS band or spectrum through a license wireless provider?
David: So CBRS is a pretty heavy topic, to be honest. It's new and that's why it's heavy. And so in order to answer this question, you kind of have to step back to understand how CBRS is implemented in the market. The FCC adopted rules for a three tier sharing process involving incumbents, priority access licensees, and also general availability, licensees. And the reason for this was to allow for the spectrum to be utilized, but to manage interference between all the different parties trying to utilize the spectrum.
Now I mentioned priority access. Those licenses were actually auctioned and the reason they were auctioned is because they hold value over the general availability of licensees. You can have priority over the GA licenses. Now that being said, incumbents can override both. They can override power licenses as well as GAA. And so yes, there is a potential for loss of service availability but it's highly unlikely, especially in times of peace, domestic peace.
And so from a perspective of how enterprise can utilize those bands, you have examples of wireless internet service providers utilizing CBRS. You have education, getting private networks on board for their campuses. It's also applies for hospitality, multi family, residential, some of the power auction winners include oil, gas, utility companies, cable companies, agriculture. And a lot of the use cases they're looking for have to do with the smart sensors and IoT devices that we were talking about earlier.
Now from a wireless provider standpoint, CBRS is a very, very important tool that can expand your capacity. So think of a hybrid model in which you utilize license bands together with CBRS and thus enable you to create a bigger pipeline per se for data. And so for a lot of the private 5g use cases that involve service availability that you need to have close to 100% or even use cases where you need to have more of a national footprint. In those cases, utilizing a wireless network provider like Verizon who also has CBRS licenses is probably the better solution than simply relying on just simple CBRS. But that being said, CBRS absolutely does open up the ability for enterprise to independently deploy a broadband solution, with high data speeds, for sure.
Abe: So Perry, opportunities in Spectrum.
Pari: Yeah. I just want to piggyback on what David just said. Look, there's definitely a need for both. CBRS, their use cases as David talked about where CBRS would be just fine. You don't have strict SLAs performance requirements, interference maybe okay. In some cases national footprint is not that important. I mean, you have those kinds of things where CBRS would be just fine. And we do see certain vertical, certain areas where CBRS is just sufficient. We also see some customers who want to start with CBRS and I'd see CBRS with more of the smaller, more localized deployments.
But as David talked about you start to think about expanding, then you want that scalability path from CBRS spectrum to license spectrum where you have that scalable path forward. So again, David talked about the drawbacks as well plus areas where CBRS is just sufficient. But I think for a carrier to really support our customers’ needs we do need to have the ability to support both and the ability to provide a scalable path forward. That's what we are saying.
Abe: David I want to go back to you, I just want to touch on security a bit as it should be part of the conversation. So private networks provide this unparalleled speed and bandwidth and also have this inherent privacy of on-premise networking to help keep the network secure. So what are some examples from your vantage point of securing private networks?
David: Well for 5g private networks within the four walls, being completely separated from a commercial network definitely helps. And considering the increasing number of IOT devices for a particular enterprise, that might be the best deployment scenario for them. That being said, there are other architectures being explored that can lower costs and create efficiencies as well. And so even those instances are being explored from a perspective of how you secure the data, while at the same time delivering a high level of service availability and security. Now according to my security guru, 5g is natively secure. The 3GPP standards for 5g include a high level of encryption and authentication, from a full system end to end, from a specification standpoint.
I would say the biggest difference between Wi-Fi and 5g is that the communication channel between entities such as signaling, bearers network function, they all use different keys and can support more advanced ciphers and algorithms. And so just from the perspective of over the air communications and how that it is encrypted all the way through your network, those standards provide for a high level of security. 5G has introduced what's called a home network or provider public key, which can be used to secure your subscriber identity privacy, and what's called a subscription permanent identifier.
So essentially it secures the user equipment or the device, starting from the initial interaction with the network, which is definitely an improvement. And as I mentioned earlier, the 3G PP standards are consistently being updated with techniques to create more security around these networks.
Abe: Perry Verizon's approach on 5g, private network security.
Pari: Yeah. I'll tell you that I think David covered it so well. 5G networks are inherently secured by design. Something that's really important to our customers protection of their data. That's really valuable for them. And it's really looking at the entire ecosystem as we talked about. Network is a key enabler, all the application data that needs to be secure. We want to be able to also provide reporting. All the monitoring and reporting capabilities that we add on top, really provides all the right data to the customers. That's so important to them.
And so again I think David address it really well. Security is one of the key reasons why folks would go after, look for private 5g again besides security, flexibility device dense, richness that 5g provides. But security is one of the key areas.
Abe: So Perry and David, I'm going to wrap with a final question, a little bit off script here, but I want to get sort of your futurist answer on 5g private networks and enterprises and where the discussion is going. Typically, I would ask this question, “where is the discussion going to be this time next year”? If you've been on this program, you probably heard that question before. However, we're all going to be in Las Vegas, or at least most of us will be in Las Vegas in September. And I'd like to do part two of this discussion. This is sort of setting the stage part of the discussion, and we'll drill down a little bit in September.
So the question is this, what do you think the discussion should be around 5g private networks and enterprises, in September? Perry, I'll start with you.
Pari: Yeah, I would say of course we talk about device ecosystem that is fast evolving. You'll see a lot more cool devices that are going to be 5g enabled. You'll see that happening. There's a lot of discussion on new types of applications that will be sitting on top. So you'll see that area really, really evolving fast. You're going to see a lot more of AR/VR type uses coming in. And so I would say there's going to be discussion on 5g enabled devices. And then there's going to be an explosion I believe, of new types of use cases that you'll see coming to market.
Think of 5g as a great enabler. Think of 5g enabling a new set of applications that will be happening and you'll see a lot more edge compute sitting next to 5g. 5g will be a gateway to edge compute. So if you're deploying a private 5g network, you want computation to happen really fast. So you'll see a lot of new news coming in the edge compute space as well. So 5g enabled devices, a lot of new applications coming in that are enabled by 5g. And then of course a lot more news on edge compute.
Abe: So again, David same question, where Samsung might be positioned in September and not too far down the road, but maybe far enough to talk about something a little bit different as far as use cases and in private 5g networks. What are your comments on that?
David: Well, I definitely agree with Perry, in that the use cases, the experiences, the devices that are going to become available definitely will probably take the spotlight. From my perspective, I think and this is probably an old topic, but I think that you're going to have the early adopters, and then you're also going to have the other folks who are in the wait and see mode. And I think that the folks who are in the latter category are really looking to understand the value and the experience that 5g brings. And they're waiting to see how other folks have implemented 5g and what they've been able to witness you and what type of transformation has been able to occur.
And so I think that we're going to start seeing some examples of that in the next coming years. And those stories are really what probably needs to get out for people to understand how 5g truly is affecting us. A lot of us who experience public 5g really do not understand how useful private networks are and how they are being utilized behind the scenes. And so I think that if that topic is really explored it would probably be very interesting.
Abe: Yeah. Well, it's really interesting from our vantage point at NMG to see really the key stakeholders driving the 5g private networking space, i.e Samsung Electronics America, and also Verizon business and Verizon as a company. So it's good to have both of you on our program at the same time. Again, we'd love to do this part two, if you will, a few months down the road and before we know it, we're going to be there.
So Perry of course we've done this before. It was this time, last year, very likely that we were talking about a similar topic, so really appreciate your time. We know you guys over in Basking Ridge are super busy and we'd love to do this again, maybe in person next time.
Pari: Thank you so much for having me on your program.
Abe: And David Kim, we haven't done this before, but you're a natural, we'd like to do this again. And I'd like to thank Samsung Electronics specifically for making today's program possible and all the folks that are on the line as well, listening in, we thank you for your support.
And again, love to do this again in September in Las Vegas and to our audience, we thank our speakers on 5G Private Networks, for this session on demand. Please go to thenetworkmediagroup.com.
For any inquiries, please email anejad@thenetworkmediagroup.com