Private networks are a budding but thus far unpollinated opportunity for purveyors of converged and modern network infrastructure. Intel is one of many technology companies targeting this space amid hopes that it will grow at a rapid pace, as widely expected, and push its products and services into new industries and frameworks.

It’s also the most obvious path for network operators, equipment manufacturers, software vendors, and cloud providers to glean additional revenue from their respective investments in the 5G era.

“Once we get the compute, and the speed, and the latency in, the natural evolution becomes ‘well, how do I serve enterprises?’” Caroline Chan, VP and GM of Intel’s 5G infrastructure division, told SDxCentral. 

Intel points to recent reports from IDC and Deloitte that predict the private LTE and 5G infrastructure market will reach $5.7 billion by 2024, and the bulk of activity will occur in ports, airports, warehouses, factories, venues, medical facilities, and schools during that period.

Chan, who also sits on the board of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), noted there’s a healthy debate about whether private networks put operators, vendors, and hyperscalers in competition. This trepidation is an extension of the long-term, complicated relationship carriers and cloud providers have in the public 5G infrastructure space. 

“The two worlds are colliding. There’s some people in the middle that started getting that, and they started partnering and knowing that there is a role for everybody,” she said. During a recent board meeting at TIP, which is planning to start a private network working group, most of the discussion centered around creating a value chain that benefits every new and old stakeholder, according to Chan. 

She doesn’t view private networks as an either-or proposition. “Many of the enterprises have a stronger relationship with the operators, so that bond I don’t think breaks,” Chan said. “At the end, this is going to be a coexistence world where we will find equilibrium where the value chain has enough” channels and layers to feed and make use of for private networks.

Private networks represent an expansion wherein the addressable market for Intel and others is growing overall, she said, adding that most of these deals include incremental revenues that would not have happened otherwise.

Network operators are involved in roughly half of the private networks that Intel has played a role in to date, according to Chan. Carriers are less involved in scenarios where enterprises make use of shared or privately held spectrum, she said, adding that “spectrum becomes a key differentiation.” 

Business and public agencies that venture into private networks are primarily concerned with latency, capacity, and other capabilities that will bolster their desired outcomes, Chan explained. “It’s really about that kind of decision matrix, rather than a technology decision matrix,” she said. 

“When there is a choice of either going with the operator or not going with the operator, really it becomes more of a business arrangement,” framed by each parties’ confidence level, pricing, and contractual obligations, Chan said. 

She also noted that while the initial emphasis is being placed on large enterprises, the market for small to midsized businesses (SMBs) is broader but different in many respects. “The value chain gets a bit longer than what we’ve seen in the macro or the carrier networks, and that’s just because each of the verticals tends to have their own different requirements, and their own ecosystems, and their own systems integrators,” Chan explained.

Large businesses may choose paths that limit the number of players involved for various reasons, but SMBs will likely rely on a combination that includes support from cloud providers, carriers, telco software, and hardware vendors, among others, she said.

“Either way, the technologies are there to provide the type of services needed,” Chan said.