Cox Communications recently added a neutral-host option to its growing private network business. The cable giant is looking to penetrate a market it sees as just now starting to gain momentum.

Brett Lasher, AVP for Cox Communications’ new growth and development division and GM for the Cox private networks business that runs within that larger division, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the company started working in the private network space three years ago and began launching commercial deployments late last year. Those efforts gained more light during this year’s MWC Barcelona event when the operator announced a deal with Intel and Future Technologies to design and deploy end-to-end managed private networks.

Cox Private Networks more recently struck a deal with InfiniG for that vendor to provide its Neutral Host-as-a-Service platform that can run alongside a Cox deployment. The InfiniG platform will allow a Cox managed private network to support cellular traffic from traditional cellular operators. This support will run on Consumer Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) spectrum that Cox Private Networks uses to power its managed deployments.

Lasher said his company handles most of the enterprise-facing aspects of the operations. This includes procurement of the equipment, spectrum and management of the private network deployment within an enterprise. InfiniG brings its existing relationships with cellular operators to act as the neutral third party “that has both the business relationships as well as the technical interconnect.”

“There's very specific equipment that's specified by the carriers, there's very specific design parameters and in combination with them we design the network to meet those specifications,” Lasher said. He added that this combination runs within Cox Private Networks’ “third-party NOC [network operations center] that we use to support the network when it’s up and running. And then any additional private network infrastructure for other use cases outside of the neutral host that is augmented onto the network is deployed and managed by Cox.”

Cox Private Networks’ deal with InfiniG is similar to recent neutral host and private network agreements signed by T-Mobile US.

The operator struck a deal with Federated Wireless to support that vendor’s private wireless network deployment on the San Luis Obispo campus of California Polytechnic State University. The agreement allows the Federated Wireless-managed network to support T-Mobile customers, providing more robust and seamless coverage within areas around the campus.

That deal was followed by neutral-host platform provider Celona scoring certification through T-Mobile’s “Bring Your Own Coverage 2.0” program that basically allows Celona’s network to act as an extension of T-Mobile's commercial network.

InfiniG also has a deal with T-Mobile – and AT&T – to integrate those carriers' commercial networks into its neutral-host platform. Lasher pointed to those operator deals and InfiniG’s history of work with Meta as to the importance of this deal for Cox Private Networks.

“In our mind, they're the pioneers in this space. They're one of the few if not the only one who has been able to get more than one carrier on a network,” Lasher said. “They have those relationships with the carriers and technical expertise to understand how to connect into the carrier network, so we believe they have a bit of an advantage over the marketplace today.”

Lasher explained that one area Cox is targeting is the commercial real estate market, where it sees opportunities with locations of between 100,000 and 500,000 square feet and a total of 40 billion square feet of opportunity in that market. It's an opportunity that legacy systems and technologies – like distributed antenna systems (DAS) – haven't been able to conquer.

“They can't afford a DAS and can't deal with the complexity of it, but they're large enough where they can afford a private network. It's a massive opportunity,” Lasher said.

Cox Private Networks’ deal with InfiniG positions the carrier to tackle the slow-moving private network space. That glacial pace has been tied to a lack of practical use cases, still-evolving technology standards and broader integration issues.

Despite those challenges, many continue to see a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity.

Analysys Mason predicts the private 5G market will grow at a 65% CAGR between 2021 and 2027, hitting 39,000 deployments at the end of that timeframe. That growth will be on the back of investments it predicts will grow from $1.5 billion in 2022 to $7.7 billion by 2027.

ABI Research recently stated that more than 1,000 private networks have been deployed worldwide but added that the number of announced networks has slowed, which is “a good sign for the private networks market.”

Lasher noted that the market itself is still finding its feet as use-case opportunities continue to coalesce and supporting technologies mature. He explained that the former requires more customer education as to how private networks can support revenue-generating use cases, while the latter might still take another year.

“Once the ecosystem matures, the equipment is there, the [spectrum access system] is doing what it needs to do and customers understand the power and capabilities of this network, there’s no doubt that this market is going to be massive,” Lasher said. “It’s just that education and maturity is taking longer than I think people expected. They predicted a hockey stick and that this year was going to be crazy. I think we’re still probably 12 to 18 months away from that exponential growth, but we are definitely starting to see more success points. As education increases and the solutions like neutral host start coming to fruition, I have no doubt this market is going to take off.”