DENVER – AT&T sees itself as being in a prime position to support private 5G wireless deployments thanks to the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on commercial cellular spectrum licenses. But the trick will be in making those potential deployments as easy as possible.

Gordon Mansfield, VP of mobility and access architecture at AT&T, explained during an interview at this week’s ConnectX event in Denver that the carrier is indeed seeing enterprises asking for help in deploying private wireless networks. He said some of those requests are for using quasi-licensed Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, however, for AT&T that path is really just an opening to a more robust private 5G network offering.

“We'll certainly build a CBRS network, but we're making sure that when we build that CBRS network we've got a path, a relatively simple path to add licensed spectrum should they hit what's needed at a future date,” Mansfield said. “There's a lot of value in private networks, but I think people are much better off having some level of relationship with a carrier that has licensed spectrum.”

CBRS spectrum is a swath of around 150 megahertz in the 3.5 GHz band that the federal government has set aside for licensed use. An organization can gain access to some of those bands for a limited geographic area using a licensing process managed by a couple of different programs.

This is seen as advantageous to unlicensed spectrum used for WiFi networks in that an organization can have control over the entire spectrum band it has gained license to. However, it’s a more limited amount of total spectrum, which can limit the overall capacity of a system using that spectrum.

AT&T and other established wireless operators, on the other hand, are sitting on hundreds of megahertz of licensed spectrum that they control — and paid dearly for. Most of that spectrum is being used to bolster their nationwide 5G networks, but they are also sitting on millimeter-wave spectrum (mmWave) that could be ripe for private 5G networks.

Those mmWave spectrum assets were initially viewed as being core to 5G network deployments. It was a lot of clean spectrum in big chunks that could provide multi-gigabit speeds to users. However, propagation challenges made outdoor deployments challenging.

But those limited propagation characteristics are perfect for indoor locations. Mansfield noted during an earlier panel session that a properly architected private 5G wireless network using mmWave spectrum could contain that spectrum within a specific location. This could be key for organizations that prioritize security and want to limit network access to four walls.

“We are really seeing millimeter wave take off in the manufacturing space,” Mansfield said. “There’s so much we can do with that spectrum. … We demonstrated for the [Department of Defense] in a smart warehouse that the speeds we were able to get for them was up to [4 GB/s]. When you think about a smart warehouse, you think about the logistics process … offloading all of what happens within the warehouse, the bandwidth that they need to actually drive all the applications, it's incredible.”

AT&T’s approach is being echoed by rivals Verizon and T-Mobile US.

Verizon recently updated its 5G private network efforts through an investment in cloud-native network core platform provider Casa Systems, which followed on a push last year to use its mmWave assets for private 5G.

T-Mobile this week launched its 5G Advanced Network Solutions business, which is its push toward using its deep licensed spectrum position to support 5G private network deployments.

Beyond the spectrum and technology decisions, the most impactful for an enterprise might be in how easy it is to deploy and manage a private network. That topic was tackled during a separate session at the event focused on the coexistence of WiFi and private cellular networks.

Panel members noted that WiFi using unlicensed spectrum has been a success because the ecosystem around those networks has made them easy for an IT department to deploy and manage. Adding new technology and spectrum layers through a private 5G wireless network could bring unworkable challenges.

“I need a whole new set of experts in order to manage an entirely different set of technology, and it turns out we're not sitting on a bunch of staff,” Jason Huitt, director of networking and telecommunications at Colorado State University, said during that panel.

A vendor representative acknowledged that challenge, stating that it would need to be solved before other systems can be implemented.

“To bring in a new technology and expect an IT manager to all of a sudden adapt to … all of the core services, we're going to need to extract that and we're going to need to find a way to make those systems work in a system that they are using with their wired and WiFi management today,” Dave Wright, head of global wireless policy at Aruba, added.