Cloud Vendors Join Telcos to Boost Private 5G

Last week's Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona showed that private 5G networks remain a focal point for telcos, cloud hyperscalers, and equipment providers. It was also evident that this area has failed to deliver hoped-for monetization for all constituents, particularly telcos. It’s costly and complicated to bring private 5G into large enterprise environments that already have established networks and cloud investments.

But there’s a trend afoot among cloud hyperscalers to team with telcos in a joint effort to spur large-enterprise business in private 5G. At the MWC event, AWS and Microsoft in particular showcased efforts to reach out to enterprise customers with telco partners.

Cloud Providers Bridge the Private 5G Gap

Cloud providers offer their own private 5G solutions. AWS, for instance, peddles its own 5G private wireless networks, and Google Cloud offers private 5G through partnerships with Celona and other vendors who run their wares within Google’s Distributed Cloud Edge (GDC Edge). Major telcos too have long offered private wireless network services based on mobile edge compute (MEC) technologies, and some have alliances with cloud providers as well. Verizon, for instance, offers its 5G Edge services in conjunction with AWS Outposts for private networks.

Now hyperscalers are seeing that by emphasizing their partnerships with telcos with new offerings, they might help large enterprises overcome resistance to private 5G adoption – resistance that has come from struggling to wed cloud environments to specific telco offerings. In order to bridge the cloud-to-telco gap at scale and thereby cover a lot of the complexity for customers up front, they are stepping up with solutions such as the following: