NATO Modernizing Approach to Communications as Carriers Tout Private Networks
As communications evolves, NATO is “at the forefront” of trying to understand new technologies, “testing and experimenting” to see which are “the most impactful,” said Antonio Calderon, chief technology officer of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, during a Mobile World Live webinar Wednesday. Other speakers said 5G means new opportunities for business and government agencies, and companies are experimenting with private networks and network slicing.
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NATO believes that largely civilian technologies like 5G “can bring enormous benefits for us,” Calderon said. Work that NATO is doing to make networks more secure can in turn be adopted by the civilian world, he added. The organization doesn’t need to “reinvent the wheel” as it moves to 5G, but it wants to “always [be] ahead of possible threats,” he said. “Who knows what will be on our plates in 10, 15 years' time?" What will happen next week can be hard to predict “because of the pace of innovation.”
Part of the “power of NATO” is that nations share data and intelligence, Calderon said. “We experiment together -- that’s one of the strongest facets of our alliance,” he said. “We are able to overcome challenges because of our diversity.” For example, like the U.S., other NATO nations are challenged by spectrum exhaust, and one focus is finding ways to more dynamically share frequencies between civilian and military users, Calderon said.
5G is a “game-changer” for how companies communicate, said Christina Patsioura, lead analyst for the IoT and enterprise at GSMA Intelligence. It’s “a globally standardized mobile technology,” which means “it’s set for really wide scalability and use.” 5G was designed for enterprise users “from the outset,” she said, and for providers, the enterprise market is “the key revenue driver.”
Carriers are “transforming themselves,” Patsioura said: They’re hiring staff to pursue new use cases and launching partnerships with other tech companies. In GSMA surveys, providers, for the first time, list as their top priority “the goal of becoming digital transformation partners” for business customers, she said. “This is showing emerging leadership and vision from the operator side.” But Patsioura said carriers need to accelerate their efforts to get the profit and revenue they need.
The market for private 5G networks “has really taken off this year,” and “we have seen some amazing growth,” said Jennifer Artley, senior vice president for 5G acceleration at Verizon Business. The growing use of AI “has really shined a light” on what companies can achieve with private networks.
Connecting everything and then having the computing power onsite to handle it is “the promise of AI,” Artley said. Companies are “eager to jump in” and want to “future-proof” their networks.
Artley added that data is critical to AI. Companies need the IoT to collect data, connectivity to move it, and “edge compute for the application level,” she said. “A lot of our customers are just swamped with digital data.” Private 5G “is a great fit for any company with a data-rich environment.” Factory floors and the shipyard of a port are “very unique environments” and “the configuration changes every day,” Artley said. “Wi-Fi isn’t ubiquitous, and a private network is more reliable.”
5G Slicing
Other speakers discussed a collaboration between Telefonica Germany and Siemens to create a 5G network “slice” for the water industry.
“Everyone knows [that] without water, nothing works,” said Daniel Mai, Siemens' director of industrial wireless communication. With climate change, there’s increasing pressure on water utilities, and Siemens has a big “footprint” in that sector. “We know what the customers need.” The water industry’s facilities are widely distributed, and companies are increasingly concerned about cybersecurity, he noted.
Water companies have a growing need for connectivity, Mai added. “A proper slice with a proper partner is a very good approach.”
Distributed locations handling critical processes need “reliable, remote connectivity,” said Andreas Cott, head of new partner concepts at Telefonica Germany. Slicing “is a way to dedicate virtual networks based on our public 5G network,” he said. “In this case, we slice out a highway for the needs of the wastewater/water customers” that’s “tailored to deliver industry-specific protocols in a reliable and secure way.”
Reliability and continuity are bigger concerns for water utilities than lower latency or throughput, Mai said. Automation in the water industry is “quite slow” and needs connections measured in seconds, not milliseconds, he said. If a utility wants to turn a pump on or off or take a measurement, “it doesn’t need to be done quickly.”