Digital business transformation coupled with advances in cellular wireless technology have opened the door for a new class of local area networks that exploit 5G technology.
Digital business transformation is forcing companies, large and small, to reexamine the effectiveness of existing wireless infrastructure. Increasingly, businesses are turning to new applications to automate their operations. These applications rely on highly reliable, low latency wireless connectivity to operate as a deterministic utility in all environments.
Although Wi-Fi has made significant gains in speed and latency, the technology isn't necessarily well-suited for providing deterministic performance in many business environments, such as large outdoor campuses and industrial buildings. This has become one of the largest obstacles in digitizing many of these industries.
5G cellular technology is often viewed as a good solution to this dilemma. Although most associate 5G with consumer offerings from mobile operators, industry leaders are increasingly adopting the private version of this technology (commonly called “private 5G"), which is typically better suited for these enterprise applications.
As the growing market potential of private 5G has become apparent, a variety of solutions have emerged — mostly from traditional telecom vendors keen on expanding the market. But now, companies are realizing that the architectures don't always easily translate from large telecom players to the enterprise.
Enterprise Barriers to Cellular Consumption
Private cellular networks (or “custom cellular networks") have been used over the years to solve wireless connectivity, reliability and mobility problems that Wi-Fi was unable to address. But given that the cellular spectrum was traditionally only accessible to mobile operators, enterprises have needed to outsource building and operating mobile networks. Because these networks use the same architectures as nationwide carrier networks, they were so expensive that the business case for custom networks only made sense in niche or extreme scenarios.
But that’s changing. What if there was a path to making private, or custom, 5G networks cost-effective and flexible enough so they could be used for most cases?
The first step toward this goal was the democratization of the cellular spectrum through industry initiatives such as the Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS) and the availability of private 5G in many countries across the globe (specifically the U.K., Germany and Japan). This has now enabled enterprises, municipalities, schools and hospitals to entertain the notion of building their own 5G network.
Still, companies have received little guidance on how to integrate private 5G into their existing enterprise IT and industrial IoT infrastructure. What's needed is a new approach to wireless connectivity that delivers the power of 5G with the economics and operational flexibility of enterprise Wi-Fi. The emergence of 5G LANs can help tackle the challenge.
What's A 5G LAN?
5G LANs are a new enterprise networking construct that marries emerging 5G cellular radio access technology with a deployment and consumption model. Like enterprise WLANs, 5G LANs include the requisite 5G radios, core control and management software. However, they're also architected to integrate with the existing IT (LAN/WAN) networks, security systems, identity management services and policy framework. Let's look at a real-world example of an enterprise integrating a 5G LAN.
Automating The Warehouse
A major operator of distribution centers was running into an issue when starting to modernize their warehouses. To ramp productivity, reduce costs and speed time to market, the company was investing millions of dollars in hundreds of autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs). These AGVs were automatically retrieving, placing and replenishing products without human intervention — often moving at speeds of 20 mph while being controlled using an on-premises application.
If the AGV can’t communicate with its central control system, it simply stops, causing production to come to a halt. The result is material losses in productivity and revenue that could cripple the business. At the same time, the company was constantly digitizing their operations with their fleets and cargo in their outdoor facilities outside the warehouse.
The company was subsequently presented with several choices, including to continue investing in more Wi-Fi gear or try to use a “slice” of a carrier’s public cellular network to connect the robots and receive outdoor coverage. But both of these options had concerns.
Adding more Wi-Fi radios wouldn’t solve wireless connectivity issues as the AGVs were whizzing around the warehouse, constantly connecting to different access points. The ability to make and retain a solid wireless connection was hit or miss. Using a public cellular network from a carrier could solve some of these problems, but it created new ones such as security concerns, relinquishing all control of the network and the data to a third party, and the inability to directly enforce the requisite service quality as environmental conditions change.
Instead, the company decided to become one of the first to adopt private 5G LAN technology. Instead of having to deploy hundreds of additional Wi-Fi access points, eight indoor cellular access points were installed to cover millions of square feet of warehouse space, keeping the AGVs always connected to the network. The mobility, roaming and latency issues resulting from wireless connections that would cause the disconnection of the AGVs with the control application mostly disappeared. Also, the company was able to use this network to provide outdoor coverage to the staff handheld devices without changing the network or security architecture.
Ultimately, selecting the right deployment scenario for a private 5G network is currently a complex task but now has been made easier with the advent of 5G LANs.
