How private 5G helps address four major business needs.

• Private 5G networks can be an attractive networking solution for organizations in retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and many other industries.
  
  
• The advantages of private 5G include high-performance mobility, data privacy protection, support for data-intensive applications, and control over network performance.
  
  
• More than half of CIOs surveyed in a global study planned to deploy private 5G within 24 months.
  
  
• No single connectivity approach fits every enterprise. Public and private 5G options, as well as a hybrid model, can work in concert with existing networks.

Public 5G is an excellent way for your employees and customers to communicate in many instances. Public 5G can even support operations inside many parts of a manufacturing plant. But delivering sufficient connectivity becomes tougher on a factory floor full of production lines or mobile robots, cameras, sensors, and other data-driven devices that require reliably-high bandwidth and low latency.

With more than 700,000 manufacturing businesses in the U.S., consider the productivity and flexibility to be gained by networks capable of handling millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. That’s where private 5G comes in.

Private 5G could support a wide variety of technologies, ranging from autonomous mobile robots transporting items and handling repetitive tasks to smart camera systems, sensors, and other devices in areas not well-served by Wi-Fi or wired connections. All the data generated by these devices offers a goldmine of insight—and 5G is designed to help you make sense of it.

This brings us to another emerging use case for private 5G: edge computing. Some of the most future-ready manufacturers are using edge to gain new efficiencies by putting processing power closer to where their data is generated. Integrating 5G’s speed, capacity, and low latency capabilities in both fixed-edge and mobile-edge environments can fuel more timely and competitive insights, especially as untapped data sources offer a broader picture of your environment. Just as important, edge computing can help you increase reliability and cut costs by reducing network traffic to and from distant data centers.

The name says it all—private 5G is more private. Having your own 5G network on premises means greater data security. And while data privacy and protection are top concerns across industries, it’s especially true in healthcare, where doctors, patients, and government regulators expect and demand privacy.

There are more than 6,000 hospitals across the U.S. with nearly 1 million staffed beds. Each hospital is responsible for the records of thousands of patients and many of these facilities need help. For instance, the medical records of more than 31 million people were exposed or disclosed without consent in the first nine months of 2022, according to a report by the HIPAA Journal.

With private 5G, hospitals have greater control over their bandwidth and data, including patient records. Integrating this level of connectivity with other approaches, like edge computing, can further help ensure that confidential data stays in the right hands.

Businesses weren’t the only organizations profoundly changed by the Covid pandemic. Higher education, for example, was transformed as well.

There were more than 3,500 degree-granting institutions in the U.S. during the 2020-2021 academic year. Initially, many of those schools needed to offer remote classes, often through high-def video streaming. Now, most of these schools have shifted to a hybrid model with some students in class and others attending remotely throughout the academic year.

This new reality requires increased network capacity and lower latency to support virtual learning, especially as newer learning modalities like extended reality (XR) become popular. A hybrid architecture that combines public 5G and private 5G can be an ideal way to extend educational services to more students. Private 5G can augment the capabilities of public 5G for richer, more reliable, and persistent connectivity, even as students move from one location to another, on or near campus.

One example: Fisk University and its partners, including T-Mobile, created a first-of-its-kind, 5G-powered interactive cadaver lab. Here, students can study the skeletal and muscular structures of the human body in XR, even if they aren’t near campus. This not only extends hands-on learning to pre-med students outside the university’s typical reach in Nashville but also offers a blueprint for future learning experiences across fields of study. “This is the future of education,” said Dr. Vann Newkirk, Fisk University’s president, when announcing the initiative.

The ability to customize and control private 5G networks can be a boon to data-driven organizations that have enormous need for connectivity and performance.

Consider a laboratory that is studying artificial intelligence (AI) or an enterprise that is working on autonomous vehicles or robots. Each area of study has different performance thresholds, among other variables, but needs dedicated and reliable connectivity.

These research-intensive and bandwidth-hungry environments can benefit from 5G connectivity tailored to their unique demands. With this kind of customization, AI applications can get the bandwidth needed to process torrents of data, for example, while autonomous robots and vehicles get the ultra-low latency they require.

One of the great things about 5G is that it’s not an either/or decision. T-Mobile offers public, private, or a hybrid approach to 5G depending on your needs. Each of these can work in concert with your existing Wi-Fi and wired networks, enhancing connectivity while preserving your investment.

Many businesses and millions of consumers can get all the capabilities they need from T-Mobile’s comprehensive public network, which supports 325 million Americans across 1.9 million square miles.

For those who require more, T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced Network Solutions team can help you envision the right connectivity for continued innovation.

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