Ericsson’s new alignment of enterprise solutions will help it to leverage its service provider heritage, rather than be constrained by it. Ericsson has helped to make 5G a reliable and ubiquitous communications technology and is in an excellent position to take that strength and apply it to the somewhat different needs of enterprises.

For instance, making cloud-based management tools such as Ericsson NetCloud Manager available for configuring, monitoring, managing, and upgrading 5G wireless networking gear is an important step in making 5G technology more accessible and usable by enterprise organizations. NetCloud Manager now includes AIOps functions for fault detection, isolation, root cause analysis, and recommended remediation, as well as APIs for integrating with other management systems—all high priorities for enterprise operations teams.

Recent Enterprise Strategy Group research found that interest in private 5G networks and 5G fixed wireless access technologies is significant. As one example, most organizations (56%) now view 5G fixed wireless access as a viable alternative to wired connectivity for edge environments (see Figure 1).¹ For those organizations that have fully deployed a private 5G network, that majority rises to 73%, indicating that 5G networking technologies are meeting or exceeding most expectations.

Figure 1. 5G Fixed Wireless Access Is Now in the Mainstream for Internet Connectivity

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

That same research found that neutral host mobile networking, which is a means for improving mobile communications efficacy for several carriers within closed or limited coverage areas, is a top five priority for enterprises.² In addition to representing a fully functional alternative to Wi-Fi for wireless LAN, Ericsson’s private 5G networking solutions can also deliver a multi-operator radio access network (MORAN) solution that massively simplifies the infrastructure and costs required for successfully deploying neutral host.

Ultimately, the potential is interesting, but real examples are the gold standard. At the Analyst Day event, Ericsson invited one of its channel partners to discuss the results of a project that involved the deployment of a private 5G network. In short, the use case was a supply warehouse, which was using Wi-Fi to track mobile equipment as it moved around the site, managing inventory and fulfilling materials requests. Due to the motion involved, the equipment kept losing connection with the Wi-Fi network, resulting in operational downtime costing more than $100,000 per hour. The partner deployed an Ericsson Private 5G network, which required only two cellular access points to replace 39 Wi-Fi access points and fully eliminated the downtime issues.

^1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, Private 5G: Inside the Progress and Opportunity, May 2024.

^2. Ibid.