Where private wireless networks based on 4G or 5G technology have seen significant investment and growth in recent years, we can’t exactly say the same about network slicing.
The 5G network slicing concept is sound – build a logical 5G network instance over your physical 5G network infrastructure and go sell it to any interested parties. It’s all very simple; sell a network slice to automotive, industry, healthcare, agriculture or whatever, sit back and watch the revenue stack. The beauty of network slicing is that service providers have the opportunity to be less reliant on the consumer market and can potentially generate new revenue streams from new market verticals.
The reality is that network slicing has been slow to take off. Firstly, you need a Standalone 5G network and at present, only about 50 of the 300 public 5G networks that are out there run as Standalone 5G. Secondly, you may have a relatively diverse vendor ecosystem in your RAN, Core and Transport networks that all need to play together to deliver the end to end slice. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you need a business case for deploying network slicing; a classic chicken and egg scenario. Do you gamble on investing in network slicing without a clear market or do you wait for these market verticals to catch up and start asking for network slicing?
Private wireless networks, particularly Private 5G networks may have a significant part to play here. Essentially, there’s two options for deploying Private 5G; you can go it alone and have no involvement whatsoever from a public mobile service provider (termed Standalone P5G) or alternatively, you can rely completely on the mobile service provider for your Private 5G network. With the latter, this is a perfect use case for network slicing – providing network slice connectivity for a localized Private 5G deployment. The P5G customer doesn’t even need to know about the intricacies of network slicing – the product they buy is simply the mobile service provider’s P5G solution.
It’s easy to assume that the choice of whether to use a Standalone P5G network or a network slice based P5G solution is down to cost. Of course, it’s a major factor but it’s worth remembering that a mobile service provider can offer a lot more than a Standalone P5G solution provider – factors such as cell site positioning, spectrum usage, scalability, expertise and analytics are all benefits that may just see network slicing raise in popularity within public 5G networks.
Just a quick technical note – Standalone P5G should not be confused with Standalone 5G. With Standalone P5G, it just means that the P5G network is deployed independently to any public networks. Also, it’s worth pointing out that if you do deploy a Standalone P5G network, there’s no reason you can’t run network slices on top of it. And if all this leaves you feeling a little confused, you might want to check out or training on 5G Network Slicing and also, Private 5G Networks!