LONDON – Private 5G from Nokia is booming worldwide after the 5G winter, but the European vendor doesn’t see the industrial market champing at the bit quite yet for the 5G standalone (5G SA) promise of network slicing.

Speaking to Stuart Sullivan, Nokia’s distribution and partner sales manager for Europe, SDxCentral learned the firm has won various private 5G contracts over the last nine months, with Asia-Pacific leading the way, and Europe making up more than 40% of the company's private 5G deployments

“Manufacturing, ports, and airports are huge for us," Sullivan said. "Logistics, transportation, hospitals, public sector, military … it's almost like someone has flipped a switch and gone, ‘let's start doing this.’ Budgets are being made.”

Sullivan put this down to current uncertainties in the world leading into demand for more security, citing this week’s cyberattack on Britain’s Heathrow airport.

“There's more investment in communications and efficiency and management of solutions," Sullivan added. "[5G’s] been around for a little while and it's that sort of getting over that hump for customers to start moving forward.”

SDxCentral’s interview with Sullivan took place a few days after Nokia announced a mega-deal alongside Ericsson to build out VodafoneThree’s 5G SA network. Vodafone Germany, meanwhile, recently launched 5G network slicing capabilities using its 5G SA core, designed for Industry 4.0 use cases, with T-Mobile US doing the same for more general business usage.

In a separate interview, Paul Alexander, VP & country general manager, Nokia UK&I, reminded SDxCentral that 5G SA deployment stands at roughly 2% worldwide, while mainline 5G adoption itself remained nascent.

“We're still in the world of 5G that's really just a bit more than 4G. So we're really moving to the world of proper 5G now,” Alexander said.

Sullivan explained this was why Nokia customers aren’t quite there yet for network slicing, being still in the early stages of what they’ll do next with their networks. Sullivan pointed to more interest in Nokia's Digital Automation Cloud (DAC), an operational support system (OSS) suite integrated in a customer’s private wireless setup.

But Sullivan did give a hint on what Nokia customers can expect next, mentioning “a number of clever things” the operator is working on around network slicing.

“I can't say too much at the moment, but there's various things we're doing with our core software, developing the ability to take it outside of our network,” Sullivan said.

Trial and error

SDxCentral’s interviews with Nokia happened at Connected Britain. One panel at the telecom event saw Juniper Networks and various utility leaders discussing connectivity powering the next U.K. industrial revolution, with a unanimous view that progress was being stalled by a cautious dependence on trials over deployment.

“The world doesn't have enough time for pilots,” Neil McRae, chief network strategist for Juniper Networks, said. “Your competition isn't trialling, it’s deploying.”

The Juniper exec added that private 5G also needs maintenance after deployment so that customers can take full advantage of their expensive investment, ensuring they drill down into the data offered by the private provision.

Nokia’s Sullivan agreed on what he saw as a longstanding “problem” in the European market. For the exec, projects only work when customers know what they really want next after a trial.

“We've had a number of customers over the last few years who've been so excited, and they put that trial in and go, 'what are we going to do with it? We've got this amazing connection. We've got this network … and 100% signal strength. What are we going to do with it?'”

“The ones who have gone through to that next stage … knew what they wanted to test: areas where they've got problems, where they've got weaknesses, where they've got dangerous scenarios," Sullivan added.

The theme of trial and error also explains Nokia’s private 5G penetration of the construction sector, where it had once “completely failed” according to Sullivan, but with Nokia now seeing interesting following recent experience in power and utilities.

“We are also starting to see quite a bit of interest from hospitals again, such as in tracking communications. You could be a doctor [and while traveling] your call seamlessly switches to the public network from your private network.," Sullivan explained. “Health care, again, was one that's quite tricky as [U.K. health care] is not necessarily bursting with spare money. But it's coming, and that level of interest as well, like other sectors.”