Partners Are 'Big Believers' In Private 5G Powering AI, Edge Apps

‘I’m a big believer that private 5G is going to be a foundational fabric,’ one solution provider executive tells CRN about the burgeoning opportunity around private cellular networking for the channel.

StepCG has carved out a niche for itself in the form of a robust private networking practice and has been deploying private cellular networks for its enterprise customers for the past three years, according to Ed Walton, CEO of the Covington, Ky.-based MSP.

The company deployed a private 5G network for one large NFL stadium for facial authentication with the help of a facial biometrics company called Wicket. The network was deployed because the existing Wi-Fi network was too saturated and wouldn’t support the use case, but the private cellular network is allowing game goers to have a frictionless experience for express entry into the stadium, as well as quick access to concessions, such as food and beverages.

“You’re having a frictionless experience without having a wait in line. It’s automated all of that, but it took a private cellular network to run it on versus running the traditional network with everything else that already runs on that network," Walton said.

Private cellular networks are helping enterprises offload some applications from their wired or wireless infrastructure, and it’s also powering next-generation AI edge use cases, such as biometric applications, he said.

“We’re just educating customers as to what’s possible as far as the plumbing,” Walton said. “We’re preaching hybrid networks to enable all these AI edge solutions and applications and getting real-time data.”

[Related: 5 Private Networking Companies To Watch In 2025]

The private networking market, which refers to isolated wireless networks or private LTE and 5G cellular infrastructure, is expected to experience significant growth, with a projected compound annual growth rate of around 21 percent and reaching a market size of $5.2 billion by 2027, according to research firm IDC. The growth, IDC said, highlights the rapid adoption of private cellular networks across various industries, particularly driven by 5G technology.

Private 5G in particular represents a big up-and-coming area of opportunity for the channel, solution providers told CRN.

“I’m a big believer that private 5G is going to be a foundational fabric, especially in manufacturing,” said Ryan Young, CTO of Albertson, N.Y.-based solution provider Vandis.

C-level executives for manufacturing and retail businesses are interested and are starting to talk to Vandis about deploying private 5G to help them reach their business initiatives, but many are still waiting for the offerings to mature a bit more, even though 5G is a viable connectivity option for many different use cases, Young said.

“I’ve been pitching [private 5G] in a lot of different use cases to figure out where it fits. I think there are a couple interesting cases around building private 5G around school districts and then extending internet to the kids in the school district on Chromebooks via private 5G. In a world where we just came out of COVID, there were kids who didn’t have internet at home. … For a lot of kids in underserved communities, cellphones are their only form of internet. I think 5G gives municipalities a way to extend connectivity and it’s the same thing with factories. As we build more of these factories, I think it’s all going to be private 5G,” he said.

Long term, Young said, private 5G is going to become an increasingly commonplace form of reliable connectivity for a number of industries.

Private 5G is also going to be critical for powering AI use cases at the edge of the network, he said.

“It’s going to be a very important piece of all of this because just from a log streaming standpoint, logs don’t like to have their connection interrupted. I think that market is going to explode, especially around edge AI,” Young said.

5G And Edge Computing: A Symbiotic'Relationship

Right now, private 5G is heavily targeted toward industrial companies and environments with very large outdoor or indoor spaces that become very hard to reach through Wi-Fi networks alone, such as manufacturing and airports, according to Shahid Ahmed, group executive vice president of new ventures and innovation for solution provider giant NTT Data.

“Good luck putting in 4,000 access points and managing those—it’s just too much to deal with—versus putting in 10 5G access points that are much more easily managed. That’s really the value driver. 5G gives you the ubiquitous, large area coverage that Wi-Fi cannot possibly do,” Ahmed said.

NTT Data in 2021 introduced its enterprise Private 5G Network as a Service platform. Since then, the company has signed hundreds of multiyear technology agreements with companies such as Celona, Cisco Systems, ServiceNow, Schneider Electric, Nokia and Qualcomm to further its 5G vision.

There’s a symbiotic relationship between private networking and edge networking, Ahmed said. For the solution provider giant’s manufacturing customers, taking advantage of the data they were collecting on their private 5G networks was a challenge. Data from the network was going to the cloud and had to be brought back down before businesses could leverage it, he said.

“The whole round trip takes too long, and it defeats the whole purpose of having a low-latency, high-bandwidth network like 5G,” Ahmed said.

That’s where the idea for an Edge AI platform came to life, which NTT rolled out in 2024. The ultralight Edge AI platform is a fully managed service that lets businesses deploy AI applications at the edge using smaller, more efficient language learning models.

“We already had a very nice edge compute offering, but what we said was, ‘OK, edge compute by itself is not enough. We need to add some AI capabilities in there so that all that data that our 5G networks are collecting can be immediately processed locally and action [can be] taken on it,’” he said.

NTT has been tapped to build Europe’s largest private 5G network, as well as the private 5G network for the city of Las Vegas and the city of Brownsville, Texas. Today, the platform is letting cities like Brownsville and Las Vegas employ AI and real-time analytics with private 5G to implement new use cases, such as predictive maintenance for smart traffic lights, public safety, crowd management and other critical activities.

While Wi-Fi isn’t going anywhere, private 5G is increasingly becoming a primary connectivity option, especially over the past 18 months, Ahmed said.

“The conversation used to be, ‘Hey, should we use Wi-Fi and 5G?’ and now it’s very much shifted to, ‘When can we use 5G because we need ubiquitous, seamless coverage? Our [autonomous guided vehicles] inside the warehouse are not able to turn corners because our Wi-Fi signals don’t reach this little area within the warehouse,’” he said. “We used to always have these debates, Wi-Fi versus 5G, and that all has passed.”