DT and Ericsson launch new 5G SA campus offering

Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have partnered on a new standalone 5G private campus network offering, aimed at on-site business communication infrastructure.

Working with Ericsson, DT has launched a new location-specific mobile network offering for companies based on 5G standalone technology, meaning the full technical benefits of can be brought to bear in bespoke business settings.  It has launched under the name Campus-Netz Private in Germany and test systems are available for businesses looking to check out how the technology might map onto their operations.

“When it comes to digitalization, industry and SMEs need a reliable partner,” said Hagen Rickmann, Managing Director for Business Customers at Telekom Deutschland GmbH. “Together with Ericsson, we help business customers in every industry to increase their productivity and exploit their full potential using 5G standalone technology.”

Arun Bansal Head of Market Area Europe & Latin America at Ericsson added: “Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson share a long-standing partnership in innovation, technology and services. Together, we offer secure, reliable and high-performance network solutions tailored to the specific business needs of our customers.”

Enterprise/industrial/business use cases for 5G often present more tangible reasons for investment, while on the consumer side, though the network rollout is continuing at pace, it’s sometimes hard to say what your average smartphone user would really notice once hooked up.

In the manufacturing space for example there is currently a huge drive to get private 5G networks onto factory floors, and those that already have provide some interesting examples of how infusing equipment with IoT technology, feeding information back via high speed connections, and analysing data pools with machine learning tools creates not only optimisation and efficiency gains but entirely new concepts like predictive maintenance.

The drive towards business 5G adoptions is reflected In Ericsson’s Q4 2021 financials, in which private network setups for enterprise were cited as one of the key drivers of its 41% YoY jump in profit. Until the tech industry provides a 5G specific consumer killer app (as Uber was for 4G), a lot of the interesting stuff around 5G will probably remain around industrial applications – and that’s clearly where firms like Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom see a lot of the future opportunities.