- Ericsson claims "hundreds" of private 5G customers
- The vendor is maintaining its enterprise wireless business even as Nokia looks to potentially sell its similar enterprise campus private network business
- Ericsson said that around 95% of these private 5G deployments use the unique features of 5G technology
Ericsson is taking a far different tack from its Nordic telco rival Nokia over the way it approaches the 5G private network business.
“Ericsson has deployed...private 5G for hundreds of enterprise customers, and at multiple sites and countries,” the Swedish vendor told Fierce. Ericsson customers are deploying production deployments at scale with around 95% of these deployments seeing customers using unique features of 5G technology, the company said.
SNS Telecom & IT has said recently that rival Nokia is approaching the milestone of 1,000 private network deployments. Clearly that vendor is currently the big dog — outside of China — in the private network world.
Nokia is possibly looking to sell its enterprise campus private network business in favor of multi-million-dollar, mission-critical private networks, although it will still sell radios and other equipment for campus private network needs through operators and integrators.
However, Ericsson is still set on selling private networks to enterprise customers, even if the contracts signed might be smaller monetarily than the major mission-critical gains Nokia is chasing.
“Ericsson operates a dedicated enterprise wireless business unit that supports the needs of enterprise customers globally (separately from our engagements with mission critical customers such as defense, public safety, utility and other wide area private 5g deployments),” the company stated.
The shifting sands of private networking
Nokia is currently the top Western vendor in the private network space, followed by Ericsson, Samsung and many other smaller Western players. “Ericsson and other players are looking at this as an opportunity to push harder into the market,” AvidThink principal Roy Chua said recently.
While he noted that Nokia will be fine with its altered approach in the private network space, he has previously said that that the change likely portends a more measured growth rate for Nokia's private wireless business. This could be good for Ericsson and others in this space.
“We continue to see growth within customers in terms of the amount of network traffic on private 5G, number of devices connected to private 5G, and number of radios deployed within existing customers,” Ericsson's spokesperon said to Fierce. “At the same time, every year we continue to see many new customers who start their 5G journey with new use cases, new devices and new applications that continue to accelerate.”