At the recent Mobile World Congress (Feb. 28 - Mar. 3) in Barcelona, Cisco announced details of its go-to-market strategy for its Cisco Private 5G offering together with its partners, in a bid to foster a new wave of productivity for enterprises with mass-scale IoT adoption.
Delivered together with global service providers and system integration partners, Cisco said its Private 5G as-a-Service offers enterprise customers reduces technical, financial, and operational risks for enterprise private 5G networks.
Further, Cisco noted its private 5G offering integrates with existing enterprise systems, including Wi-Fi 5/6/6E versions, making operations simple. Using the platform's simple management portal, enterprise IT teams can maintain policy and identity across both Wi-Fi and 5G for simplified operations.
Cisco emphasized that its private 5G networking is both financially and operationally simple to understand. With pay-as-you-use consumption models, customers can save money with no up-front infrastructure costs, and ramp up services as they need. Businesses can spare IT staff from having to learn, design, and operate a complex, carrier class private network.
Cisco said it has worked in close collaboration with two leading ORAN vendors to include ORAN technology as part of Cisco Private 5G, and that the company is currently in customer trials with Airspan and JMA.
“Developing innovative, customized 5G private network solutions for the enterprise market is a major opportunity to monetize the many advantages of 5G technology. Airspan is proud to be one of the first leading Open RAN partners to participate in the Cisco Private 5G solution and offer our cutting edge 5G RAN solutions including systems and software that are optimized for numerous enterprise use cases," commented Eric Stonestrom, chairman and CEO, Airspan
“This partnership opens a world of new possibilities for enterprises. With simple downloaded upgrades, our all-software RAN can operate on the same physical infrastructure for 10+ years—no more hardware replacements every 36 months. And as the only system in the world that can accommodate multiple operators on the same private network, it eliminates the need to build separate networks for new licensed band operators,” said Joe Constantine, chief technology and strategy officer at JMA.
Cisco added that it is working together with its partners on private 5G projects for customers across a wide range of industries including Chaplin, Clair Global, Colt Technology Services, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, Network Rail, Nutrien, Schaeffler Group, Texas A&M University, Toshiba, Virgin Media O2, Zebra Technologies and others.
Cisco said that it has multiple private 5G pilots and projects currently underway, spanning the education, entertainment, government, manufacturing, and real estate sectors.
