Ericsson’s private 5G offering now comes in two flavors — a basic option that is mostly resold by operators and systems integrators, and a more customizable option the vendor sells directly to enterprises.

The Swedish company recently released Ericsson Private 5G, which embodies the latter flavor, supporting 4G LTE and 5G in a compact footprint. Thomas Noren, head of Ericsson’s dedicated networks business, described the platform as “a scaled down version of a mobile network” that can be integrated with enterprise IT systems and is supported by “virtually every base station configuration.”

The compact, single-server solution is paired with full redundancy and “has all the core network functions on site, so you have very high reliability and survivability,” he explained. “It supports a very wide set of frequency bands and base station configurations, so you can support both indoor and outdoor small cells, micros, and macros.”

Businesses can integrate operational technology and IT systems via an open API and radios can be deployed with a click, according to Noren. Ericsson currently provides a mix of radios, including the same radios it sells to mobile network operators and some others tailored for private networks. The company plans to add more specialized radios for private networks as the opportunity and customer base expands, he added. 

“It’s not these toy radios that you sometimes see for demo purposes and so forth in trade shows and such. It’s the real stuff,” Noren said.

Ericsson Private 5G is a single vendor framework and doesn’t allow for other vendor equipment or software to control or otherwise orchestrate the private network. “We take full responsibility for the entire software stack here,” he said.

“It’s fully cloudified and we think that’s required in these deployment scenarios because it allows us to do lifecycle management in a much more flexible way. Today we use Google Cloud as the platform for the lifecycle management portal, but it’s of course an Ericsson software running on the Google Cloud. We take full responsibility end to end for connectivity,” Noren said. 

“We don’t load the local IT manager with a lot of complexity that he or she is not really prepared to use. It’s more like a WiFi-like or simplified-network view. All that the IT manager needs, but not more than that,” he said. “They are not specialists in cellular networks so they want to understand and they need to act on certain issues if there are any, but they don’t want all the complexities of a mobile broadband network.”

Enterprises and IT professionals want to focus on business outcomes, and that requires predictable performance characteristics and clear evidence of what to expect from a private network without additional complexity, according to Noren.

Most of the software included in Ericsson’s Private 5G offering is also carried over and reused from its macro network deployments. “We have been able to use software components from our macro network and we can strip some things that are not really needed,” such as deep packet inspection, he said. 

Ericsson’s enterprise customers gain a big advantage from that cloud-based architecture and the vendor’s expertise in software for radio access networks (RAN) and network cores “because we can add functionality also for these small networks that are typically otherwise reserved for macro networks,” Noren said.

Ericsson Private 5G is initially targeting seven industries, including manufacturing, mining, processing plants, offshore and power utilities, ports, and airports because that’s where it sees the greatest demand, particularly among organizations looking to replace two-way radios systems, he explained. 

Indeed, most of Ericsson’s private network deployments to date replaced professional or land mobile radio systems because those legacy systems are clumsy, expensive, and don’t support digital services, Noren added. The vendor is receiving more requests from large corporate campuses and also sees a growing opportunity in sports and entertainment venues, he said. 

Industry Connect, Ericsson’s private network offering that’s resold by carriers and systems integrators, has been deployed in more than 20 countries but the vendor won’t say how many businesses or networks are supported by Industry Connect to date. 

“We actually don’t reveal that number, but we are starting to get a lot of experience now,” Noren said.