Amazon Web Services re:invent is this week, and as you might expect, there are a ton of announcements. I’m going to spotlight one in particular.
The company is launching AWS Private 5G, a service designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy and manage their own private mobile network. Customers indicate where they want the network built and its capacity prior to the service being turned on and automatically configured. AWS will send customers the hardware, software, and SIM cards to do it. The pricing model is pay-as-you-go for bandwidth, not devices.
Why do we care?
Private 5G, designed to rival or extend WiFi networks – or replace them. That last one is a long-term vision for sure.
One of the key disruptions to network engineering is 5G bandwidth being faster than those internal solutions. This brings that back under enterprise control, and becomes a best of both worlds situation for large enterprises.
For smaller ones, it could well be they simply go right to the public internet, just as they would go to public cloud or SaaS versus private cloud. Regardless, the idea of Private 5G is a significant change to be aware of from a design perspective… and brought to you by one of the big cloud providers.