LAS VEGAS – One year after unveiling its Private 5G platform, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) push into the increasingly competitive private network space remains a work in progress as evident by the near absence of any new updates during keynotes at this year’s re:Invent show. However, individual interviews uncovered unique learnings and challenges from over the past 12 months.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced the initiative during his exhaustive keynote address at last year’s re:Invent show, explaining it would allow users to “set up and scale a private mobile network in days instead of months. You get all the goodness of mobile technology without the pain of long planning cycles, complex integrations, and the high upfront costs.”

“It’s shockingly easy,” he added. “You tell us where you want to build your network and specify the network capacity, we ship you all the required hardware, the software, and the SIM cards. Once they’re powered on, the private 5G network just simply auto-configures and sets up a mobile network that can span anything from your corporate office to a large campus, to a factory floor or a warehouse.”

While initial details were light, AWS provided more details as part of the Private 5G platform commercial launch in August. This included its integration of small cell radio units, AWS’ Outposts servers, a 5G core, and radio access network (RAN) software running on AWS-managed hardware, and details on its initial pricing model.

Analysts were decidedly mixed on those details.

“It looks to be more of a beta launch than a full commercial launch,” Daryl Schoolar, program VP for worldwide telecommunications at IDC, said in an interview with SDxCentral on the launch. He added that AWS was maybe seeing some pressure to provide more details on the platform as it has been nine months since it was first announced.

One significant omission considering the platform’s name was the lack of 5G radios being included in the package.

Douglas Bellin, global lead of business development for Smart Factories and Industry 4.0 at AWS, explained during an interview at this week’s re:Invent show that the lack of 5G focus is tied to a lack of 5G-enabled devices.

“One of the benefits of 5G is lower latency,” Bellin said. “But the problem with that is there’s not a lot of endpoints with 5G enabled. Phones, tablets, but robots? Not yet. … It's a chicken-and-the-egg that we're kind of fighting in the market, and we're working with some of those vendors who are making that hardware to become 5G-enabled.”

He explained that the average machine age across manufacturing globally is 25 years old, which means there is not a lot of equipment that can communicate with a 5G radio. For wireless technologies, the age of these devices aligns with when Wi-Fi was still new and the cellular industry was deep in its 2G technology phase.

“It’s how you retrofit that and manage that and build that, and a lot of time that’s the basic that we have to come over,” Bellin said. “It’s not the [artificial intelligence] or [machine learning] – there’s a lot of that out there, there’s partners who can do that, there’s a lot of already done things with that. But, how do you get the data to it? Is it 5G could be the backhaul to that?”

Bellin added that it might not be that difficult to put a 5G radio or wireless access point onto a 25-year-old machine, but a lot of the current use cases do not require that type of bandwidth or network control.

“It is a little bit of a technology still looking for the right use case,” Bellin said. “The technology hurdle, I feel, is still just getting the right piece of the hardware ready.”

AWS has been actively courting ecosystem partners to help bolster its private 5G presence. This includes work with Federated Wireless to help with spectrum management for the AWS Private 5G service, and more recently with JMA Wireless to provide its cloud-native 5G radio xRAN product to run on AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Despite the challenges, AWS remains convinced the overall private 5G space remains ripe with opportunities, especially outside of larger enterprises that have so far been driving demand and getting the most attention.

“I think that the private wireless industry is still in an early phase, and we are going after a market and introducing technology to a market that never had access to it,” Jan Hofmeyr, VP for AWS’ EC2 platform said in a separate interview at this week’s re:Invent show. “It was more for very large enterprises, big airports, big facilities. … So we see that market really starting to run use cases that we see are starting to move to production.”