The private mobile network market has received fresh injections of competition with a new Google service and India's 5G spectrum plans.
Google, Indian government shake up private 5G networks
The fast-shifting private mobile network market has received fresh injections of competition with Google’s announcement it will start selling private networks directly to enterprises and the Indian government’s decision to make 5G spectrum available to enterprises and telcos.
India’s government will become the latest to make 5G spectrum available to companies other than telecoms operators when it auctions 5G spectrum before the end of July this year. Its aim is to drive the development of ‘private captive 5G networks’ and “spur a new wave of innovations in Industry 4.0 applications” across multiple sectors.
The Broadband Forum of India, whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, welcomed the move in a position paper. One of BFI’s arguments is that “enterprises themselves should have the option to set up their private networks themselves, or choose the best possible Service Provider to do so for them.” In contrast, Light Reading reports that the Cellular Operators of India (COAI), which represents Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea oppose the government’s plans.
And indeed, the announcement came in the same week as Google laid out its to private wireless networking solution which it will sell directly to enterprises.
Google has signed up a roster of partners, including the telecoms network infrastructure provider, Crown Castle, whose assets include towers, small cells and fiber networks and the Wi-fi and private network provider Boingo. Built on Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Edge, Google sets out to make it possible for customers to “rapidly adopt turn-key, private network solutions with the flexibility to deploy management, control, and user plane functions both in the cloud and at the edge.”
The offer will include Google Cloud and security services, as well an IT environment designed to facilitate the development of new applications, an area where CSPs may struggle to compete.
“By building on a mature, cloud-native management experience, powered by Anthos, enterprises benefit from a consistent developer and operational model across their entire IT estate. In addition, Distributed Cloud Edge offers the flexibility to scale to other use cases that need low latency and Quality of Service (QoS) for critical applications.”
Google is joining AWS and Microsoft, equipment manufacturers, enterprise networking companies, systems integrators and CSPs in pursuit of a nascent private 5G network market that is still very much in flux globally. As the recent agreement between BT and Ericsson to address the UK market for 5G Private Networks suggests, partnerships will be among the unfolding trends. But the stakes are high, and it is far from clear today who will gain greatest control of enterprise customer relationships.