Private 5G must scale with vertical use cases and edge-native AI, or quietly fade away

Hyped for years as the next big thing, private 5G was placed at the centre of enterprise digital transformation efforts but has only made tentative progress across the world. 2025 is the year for private networks, and private 5G in particular, to deliver or risk a quiet fade from relevance.

Signs are positive, however, with growth across industry verticals, new use cases and an expanding end-to-end ecosystem including telecoms operators and systems integrators to set up private wireless networks.

Moreover, enterprises are beginning to deploy private 5G as the key connectivity fabric to enable increasingly complex workloads across their hybrid, multi-cloud networks. There is also increasing focus on plugging the gaps in the private 5G proposition, with AI-enabled edge platforms a key focus area.

New industry verticals and use cases

A number of new industry verticals are driving demand for private networks. Indeed, the private 5G proposition has moved beyond initial attention from verticals like mining and manufacturing to more broad- based demand around three use cases.

Mission critical connectivity: Demand is visible from verticals which require rock solid connectivity in sectors including defence, oil and gas, energy and even smart cities, for autonomous vehicles, worker safety, defect detection and other applications.
Surge traffic: There is increasing demand from verticals that see “surge traffic”, which typically includes live entertainment, sports and similar events, with a recent example at the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix where Singtel deployed a network slice for increased user experience.
Uplink capacity: Demand is also visible from segments needing strong uplink for video streaming, CCTV and other similar use cases, with a recent example at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics where Orange deployed a standalone private 5G network to enable higher uplink for video uploads.

2025 will be the year that momentum should kick into gear

The complexity of enterprise requirements means that there is an increasing shift in the competitive landscape towards systems integrators

Private networks will “take a village”

Private 5G as a segment is also benefitting from a healthy dose of realism that seems to have seeped into the industry, as increasing attention is being paid to filling the gaps in the proposition.

From an initial focus and hype on pure connectivity benefits offered by 5G, vendors and suppliers are pivoting towards partnerships with the broader ecosystem to offer enterprises greater flexibility and end-to-end solutions.

The diversity of enterprise requirements also means that one size does not fit all cases. The ecosystem now has multiple vendors catering to each segment with a few large vendors, such as Nokia and Ericsson, and a very long tail of smaller suppliers.

One clear example is the vast number of providers for mobile core software, from industry pioneers such as HPE Athonet to companies such as Celona and Druid Software.

Many of these solutions are based on the principles of virtual and open RAN to allow them to be flexible and scale based on enterprise requirements. Many are built on Intel’s FlexRAN reference architecture, a key enabler of solutions catering to enterprise requirements.

The complexity of enterprise requirements means that there is an increasing shift in the competitive landscape towards systems integrators (SIs) as a key partner for enterprises.

SIs have deep existing relationships with enterprises and are increasingly stepping up to lead on private wireless networks. There are, however, several larger telecoms operators that have made great strides in this regard, these include the large Chinese operators and others such as Singtel, Telstra and Verizon.

Private networks need a converged edge platform with AI

Increasing demand from industry verticals for connected endpoints is driving the advent of the edge as a computing paradigm.

The emergence of edge compute is aided in large part by its increasing convergence with private 5G, IoT and AI. For enterprises, radios and a mobile core of their choice is an incomplete solution with poor return on investment.

Indeed, value points have shifted away from radios and mobile cores (which are now table stakes), towards the distributed edge and seamless orchestration of workloads across enterprise information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments.

Real value will be driven in a “converged edge” solution that gives enterprises the flexibility to deploy workloads and handle processing of data traffic from endpoints on-premises or segregate some workloads to be processed through multi-cloud connectivity to public or private clouds.

The latest use cases including defect detection, worker safety applications, frictionless checkout, or emergency safety, all benefit from increased automation for fast and seamless data processing and transfer.

This requires open, scalable and performant edge servers that allow developers to create edge-native AI applications. As private 5G increasingly plugs the gaps in the proposition in combination with edge compute and AI, 2025 will see a surge of enterprise deployments across verticals that drives digital transformation.