Recognize the Need for Private 5G Networks
Private networks refer to privately owned wireless connectivity solutions—typically built on 5G virtualized radio access network (vRAN) infrastructure—that support AI, data generation, processing, analysis, and communications at the edge. Private networks use cellular technologies to deliver more throughput, reliability, and coverage than Wi-Fi and are meant to augment but not replace traditional Wi-Fi.
Two primary criteria that indicate the need for a private network include:
-
Scalability and flexibility, specifically when an organization needs to onboard hundreds or thousands of users and devices. Consider a stadium environment with thousands of spectators or a mix of edge devices, including live event broadcasting inside the stadium and AI computer vision‒enabled traffic management outside the stadium.
Read how Intel-enabled private 5G networks delivered the performance required for live global sporting event broadcasts at sub-200ms latencies. -
Challenging environments such as the outdoors, a warehouse or factory floor, or anywhere where a wired connection would be inconvenient, impractical, and excessively expensive. Consider the need to connect automated farming equipment in a rural area or equipment and personnel on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean.
Read how Intel and Blue White Robotics overcame rural connectivity challenges to deploy automated farming.
Businesses and organizations in entertainment and venue management, utilities, the energy sector, industrial factories or warehouses, airports, seaports, and other transportation and logistics hubs can all benefit from private networks for their connectivity needs now and in the future.
Understand the Benefits of Private 5G Networks
Private 5G networks do not negate or replace existing Wi-Fi or radio capabilities, nor will all private networking solutions be exclusively private. Rather, deploying private 5G networks most often becomes a hybrid implementation that provides additive business benefits to existing capabilities, helping to make brownfield and greenfield environments completely wireless.
Additive benefits of private 5G networks include:
- Coverage that’s tailored to the environment. In addition to being especially useful for outdoor conditions, private networking offers the ability to place vRAN nodes across a site to deliver coverage and capacity suited to an organization’s exact needs. Read how Intel, Verizon, and Nokia helped bring private 5G connectivity to 726 acres in one of Britain’s busiest seaports.
- Control with enhanced security for sensitive data and workloads, including the ability to customize policies on how that data is stored, transmitted, and used. Organizations also benefit from data sovereignty and the assurance that comes with maintaining data on wholly owned infrastructure instead of using slices of a public cellular operator. Read how Intel ecosystem partner Comba deployed a private 5G network with hardened enclosures and reliability features for a mining company.
- Cost reductions through efficient infrastructure that enables low operating expenditures (OpEx) and supports cost-efficient data processing at the edge instead of having to backhaul workloads to the cloud. Many organizations can use existing infrastructure—including rack servers, switches, and routers—to help jump-start their private network deployments for an easier, more cost-efficient path to value. Watch as Intel, AWS, and Megh Computing enable a private 5G network to quickly provide broadband internet access to underserved school districts during COVID-19.
- Competitive advantage built on the enhanced productivity and flexibility of digital transformation and edge AI use cases. Private 5G networks are also built on a foundation of cellular technologies that have been proven and tested over years, so organizations have a reliable means to plan for success. Read how Intel and Mavenir use the performance and reliability of private 5G networks to enable edge AI and Industry 4.0 outcomes.
Plan Your Private 5G Network Implementation
When planning your private 5G network deployment, the first consideration is to establish your organization’s coverage, capacity, speed, and latency needs. For example, how much throughput is required to support a live UHD video broadcast? How time sensitive are workloads for robotics use cases? You will work with your solution provider to determine the technical specifications required.
The second major consideration is understanding your backhauling needs, or how much of your data generated and processed at the edge will stay at the edge. Some data may need to be backhauled to the 5G core network, an enterprise IT network, or the cloud for additional processing. One of the key advantages of private 5G networks is the ability to analyze and act on data at the edge, reducing the costs involved with backhauling data, although this will depend on each use case.
Lastly, working with your solution provider, you will need to explore the availability of the 5G spectrum in your region. This is determined at the national government level and differs for each country.
Read this white paper to explore a detailed implementation workflow for AI-ready enterprise private 5G networks.
Reduce Complexity with a Trusted Technology Partner
Private network deployments are one element of a full end-to-end solution that includes edge compute capabilities. Working with a technology partner can help manage the complexity of these distributed environments while streamlining costs and solution orchestration hurdles.
Intel provides many of the building blocks of a complete end-to-end private networking solution that integrates hardware, such as processors, GPUs, and XPUs; software, such as the Intel® Geti™ platform to support capabilities like AI computer vision; and a vast software vendor ecosystem. Intel works with network and edge software vendors worldwide to help ensure optimized performance of their solutions on Intel® hardware, which results in smoother operations and lower costs for businesses and organizations.
Browse ecosystem partner solutions on the Intel® Partner Showcase.
Choose the Right Private Network Hardware to Help Ensure Success
A successful private 5G network transformation starts with a strong foundation, such as one powered by the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® vRAN Boost. Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors support both vRAN infrastructure for private network connectivity and the edge servers that will host your applications, including AI. Built-in Intel® Accelerator Engines include AI and vRAN acceleration that’s directly integrated onto the CPU1 to help reduce the need for external acceleration cards and unnecessary hardware costs.
Compared to the previous generation platform, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors deliver up to double the vRAN capacity, with approximately 20 percent more compute power savings, effectively more than doubling the performance per watt.2
Intel® Ethernet 800 Series network adaptors deliver speeds of up to 100GbE and enable enhanced network timing and synchronization protocols to support latency-bounded workloads and deterministic computing.
Intel® FPGAs offer several entry points to accelerate AI, data movement, processing, encryption, and compression at any point within the private network.
Intel® GPUs support video processing and encoding/decoding and AI inference workloads for high-value use cases in AI computer vision at the edge, which many private network deployments will be supporting.
Enhance Private 5G Networking Stacks with Optimized Software
Intel® FlexRAN™ reference architecture provides a blueprint for virtualizing the RAN while implementing key power management capabilities of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Organizations can use this reference architecture to accelerate their development cycle while optimizing their vRAN energy efficiency.
In addition to private network virtualization, Intel offers platforms to support advanced AI-driven use cases:
- For AI computer vision use cases, the Intel® Geti™ AI platform speeds up AI model training with a user-friendly, low-code/no-code interface. Organizations can leverage experts outside the realm of data science to help train and deploy AI models more quickly.
- For AI computer vision, large language models, and generative AI, the OpenVINO™ toolkit provides an open source framework to accelerate models while reducing their footprint. The resulting models are optimized for high performance across heterogeneous hardware targets, ideal for distributed environments at the edge.
- Intel® SceneScape is a platform built to ingest sensor data, facilitate the creation of detail-rich digital twins, and help automate situational awareness for locations and equipment.
- Project Strata, launching in 2024, is an intelligent edge and hybrid AI solution that will enable developers to build, deploy, run, manage, connect, and help secure distributed edge infrastructure and applications.
Partner with Intel to Simplify Your Private Network
Deploying the ideal private network for your organization might seem complex, but Intel offers the modular building blocks, including hardware and software, to help simplify your journey and expedite your time to value. Get started by connecting with your Intel representative or any Intel® technology partner, and put proven, market-ready solutions to work for your organization now.
Find Intel® technology partners and solutions today on the Intel® Partner Showcase.