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The future of private 5G is on the line: Enterprise 5G in 2026 and beyond
21 Plays22 days ago
In today's episode, I am joined by Manish Tiwari, Head of Enterprise 5G at Ericsson, to discuss how the enterprise 5G market has evolved, what stories customers tell about this technology, and what practical examples and suggestions can help drive the market forward. We also look ahead to 2026 — the trends poised to define the market, the innovations set to energize enterprises (from robotics to AI), and what comes next for a sector at a pivotal moment in its journey.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:02
Pablo Tomasi
So welcome back to the Telco Drift. I am Pablo, and most of the time I'm spending it as an analyst, but i'm mostly trying to make it as a as a podcaster. And today's the episode, I'm quite excited to be joined by Manish Tiwari, head of enterprise 5G at Ericsson, to chat about what is happening in the market and what will happen in 2026. So Manish, welcome to the Telco Drift.
00:00:26
Manish Tiwari
Thank you, Pablo. Pleasure to be here.
00:00:29
Pablo Tomasi
So before talking you know Enterprise 5G, private networks, and and all that good stuff, can you tell us a little bit more of you know how did you end up head of enterprise 5G What's your story so far?
00:00:41
Manish Tiwari
ah Sure, Pablo. I have been in the enterprise networking space for about 25 years. I started my career, ah and i mean, during the heydays of the internet when the core internet infrastructure was getting built in the late 90s and early two thousand s And then I after a few years of doing that, I ah I went into Wi-Fi ah at the time when Wi-Fi chips were not there yet in the laptops. We were still using dongles. There were no Wi-Fi networks in any of the enterprises. and We were just starting to see employees bring rogue access points from their homes into offices and enterprises getting concerned by the security threat ah imposed by Wi-Fi on the networks.
00:01:26
Manish Tiwari
So I mean i've spent a long time in Wi-Fi from 2002 to almost 2019, 2020 timeframe. That's when I ah I was at Aruba for a few years, then we got acquired by HPE.
00:01:40
Manish Tiwari
I was with HPE for part of the networking business group for for a few years. And then I left in 2020 and ah came into the cellular sort of world. and I joined a company called Cradle Cradlepoint I ran their strategy and Cop Dev.
00:01:53
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:01:54
Manish Tiwari
Cradle Point got acquired by Ericsson in late 2020. And ah eventually there was a business unit formed inside Ericsson called Enterprise Wireless Solutions, This business unit has the sole mission to take cellular technologies and make that make them pervasive in enterprise environments. So for the past few years, that's what I've been doing. And I'm responsible for our business line called Enterprise 5G, which includes our private networking portfolio, our neutral host portfolio, and there are just and technologies that go with that.
00:02:26
Pablo Tomasi
Amazing.
Comparing Wi-Fi and Private Cellular Networks
00:02:27
Pablo Tomasi
you're You're definitely the right person to you know ask what's going to happen next year. But I just want to very quickly touch on on a point that you mentioned. So you started talking about Wi-Fi and how that sort of that technology evolved with you know being added to computer and auto to device. And I think that is quite relevant because when I talk to a lot of people,
00:02:46
Pablo Tomasi
it It seems that for them, Wi-Fi has always been there, right? Because when when I'm telling them, you know, it takes time for private cellular, you know, to get where Wi-Fi is, is because Wi-Fi has already spent, you know, years and years of kind of building the ecosystem.
00:03:00
Pablo Tomasi
It wasn't created from day zero, right? So it's going to take a bit of time.
00:03:03
Manish Tiwari
Yes. Yes. No, actually, it's very interesting because these days ah we take for granted the availability of Wi-Fi everywhere we go, whether it's an airport or ah or a hotel or or even our own own homes and so on.
00:03:19
Manish Tiwari
And the reality is there was a time. In fact, there were a few years from, I would say, 2001 to 2008 timeframe, eight timeframe where ah for those of us who used to be in the Wi-Fi industry, we used to wonder what is the killer app for Wi-Fi and when are we going to see the scale and when are we going to see enterprises deploy this?
00:03:38
Manish Tiwari
Because we were building a lot of technology, ah but the customers were using this more as a as ah as something to show off to their customers. So they would deploy it in their EBCs, in their executive briefing centers, they would deploy it in the reception area, but they were definitely not deployed everywhere where their employees were. um the chipset The device ecosystem was still immature at that time. The chipset prices were still high.
00:04:03
Manish Tiwari
So that journey that Wi-Fi went through from 2001 to 2007, 2008 is something that people don't remember now, but there was a time where Wi-Fi was not pervasive. And it took some time for the device ecosystem to catch up and for for that technology to become pervasive as well.
00:04:17
Pablo Tomasi
it's It's a beautiful deja vu happening you know with other markets as well. So the good news is that at at the end of the it made it.
00:04:22
Manish Tiwari
Exactly.
00:04:25
Pablo Tomasi
And you know i'm I'm optimistic on on private cellular as well.
Private 5G Developments in 2025
00:04:29
Pablo Tomasi
But, OK, if we're thinking out, so 2025 has been a crazy year for private 5G for multiple multiple reasons.
00:04:37
Pablo Tomasi
There's been like a a lot of drama. let's Let's leave it like that. But I'm curious from from your end, how how have you seen the market?
00:04:41
Manish Tiwari
Yeah.
00:04:44
Pablo Tomasi
ah are Are we going in the right direction? Are you guys happy with what you've seen? Would you like to see more maybe from partners or other parts of the ecosystem?
00:04:53
Manish Tiwari
Yeah, so I think ah the way I think about this is um if you look at the journey, ah let's let's take a timeframe of about three years, what has changed in the last three years.
00:05:05
Manish Tiwari
ah And we can almost divide our ah prospect prospective customers or the kind of enterprises that are using a private 5G into three different personas.
Types of Enterprises Adopting Private 5G
00:05:17
Manish Tiwari
ah So one persona would be the kind of enterprises that operate in environments that require a pretty broad coverage.
00:05:19
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:05:25
Manish Tiwari
So these would be oil and gas customers, these would be wind farms, these would be outdoor environments where there is a need for a large st ge geographical area to be to have some sort of connectivity.
00:05:36
Manish Tiwari
And this set of enterprises were using a private network even during the 4G days. There used to be 4G deployments and the connect i mean the basic problem statement print was I need some sort of connectivity that is reliable and that can allow my ah devices that don't consume a lot of bandwidth. They are sensors, they are meters and things like that, but I need some network to to be able to offer that connectivity.
00:06:00
Manish Tiwari
So that's sort of your first segment of enterprises. They continue to exist. Those deployments continue to scale from 4G to 5G. There are migrations happening. People who started on five G they are upgrading to 5G. People who started on 4G are upgrading to 5G and so on.
00:06:16
Manish Tiwari
Then we have a second set of enterprises who who have new use cases. And these new use cases have continued to mature over the past few years. So that this advancement of enterprise use cases is is pretty interesting to see.
00:06:32
Manish Tiwari
So first of all, for example, as tracking location, autonomous control and computer vision technologies have matured, so have the enterprises use enterprise use cases that are taking advantage of these underlying technologies.
00:06:45
Manish Tiwari
So we started to see wide area coverage getting combined with autonomous control in mining. So remotely operated vehicles due to worker safety concerns in hazardous environments.
00:06:56
Manish Tiwari
We started to see ports embrace AI for remote inspection to detect errors and faults in operations. So video cameras starting to upload a lot of video and then AI algorythms trying to automatically detect faults in operations or workers not wearing so a safety vest.
00:07:12
Manish Tiwari
In railways, we started to see robots being deployed to do visual inspection for predictive maintenance and auto detection of faults and maintenance issues. There are these kind of use cases that started coming up.
00:07:23
Manish Tiwari
And then we started to see AGVs come into the scene, right? So mobile HMI, smart tools, mobile surveillance ah in manufacturing environments.
00:07:26
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:07:31
Manish Tiwari
ah Data showering started to appear. So a lot of cars have a lot of software these days, and that software needs to be downloaded on the manufacturing line pretty pretty fast on a number of cars because the cycle time of the ah manufacturing of a vehicle depends on how fast you can make that download happen.
00:07:47
Manish Tiwari
So what was a simple use case for ah maybe scanners in a warehouse could be combined with all of these new applications and all of a sudden the justification for private 5G becomes much clearer and the aggregate value of the use cases increases significantly. So this is sort of the journey that the industry has been on in the last three years, where three years ago we were seeing people experiment with advanced use cases that 5G could
Justifying Private 5G Investments
00:08:14
Manish Tiwari
enable. But now if we look at the deployments, then it is pretty prevalent that every deployment that is in production has a combination of these use cases that are enabled by these underlying technologies that got developed in the last five years.
00:08:27
Pablo Tomasi
that That's fascinating because sort of you in my in my other life as an analyst, we're working for for Omdia ah We've had a lot of conversation, we've done a lot of research, and what you're mentioning about, you know, you're effectively, you're putting use case on top of each other, right?
00:08:44
Pablo Tomasi
One use case, it may be sort of a tough conversation, but once you have like two, three use cases that that are all supported by the same network, then why you need the network becomes so a much easier conversation, right? Because like, okay, you have multiple benefits potentially across different departments as well. and and that makes it much easier. So it again, it seems... So the the whole market has been evolved, right? from From the pure coverage play, sort of basic, you can call it connectivity and IoT, to advanced IoT, industrial IoT type of scenarios, which I think is encouraging, right? Because that's ah that's the the problem that enterprises have nowadays.
00:09:28
Pablo Tomasi
But if we then look at 2026, how do you expect things to change?
Future of 5G Adoption by 2026
00:09:31
Pablo Tomasi
did Do you see more of the same in acceleration? ah you think maybe 6G will start you know being discussed as a technology?
00:09:41
Pablo Tomasi
if
00:09:42
Manish Tiwari
Yeah, I think ah in the in the macro network world, of course, conversations on 6G are going to start. But from an enterprise standpoint, I think we still have a lot of ah work to do ah to make these enterprise networks scale globally. as well as for enterprises to embrace 5G at a much bigger scale. it is It is happening, it has been going on for the past three, four years, but there is significant road in front of us for that scale to happen.
00:10:13
Manish Tiwari
ah Now, ah i was in my earlier answer, I was talking about these three different personas of enterprises that are sort of embracing private 5G.
00:10:22
Manish Tiwari
I talked about the first and the second. There is also a third one, which is ah enterprises who have a Wi-Fi network in place. They don't necessarily have new advanced use cases for 5G, but they look at ah private networks and private 5G as an opportunity to make their ah Wi-Fi network more robust and stable.
00:10:45
Manish Tiwari
And they do, know, I mean, maybe they have some coverage holes that they want to fill with private 5G, or they are tired of the hardware refreshes that they have to do on Wi-Fi networks every three to four years.
00:10:50
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah.
00:10:57
Manish Tiwari
So we have had enterprises come to us and say that, hey, can you guys sort of help me with not having to do these hardware refreshes that I have to do every three, four years?
00:11:07
Manish Tiwari
And if you look at the Wi-Fi business for the past 25 years, that's what it has been. Every three, four years, there is a new standard. Then we go to every university and say, hey, you have students coming with new laptops that will support these new standards. Why do you have an obsolete network that doesn't support those laptops? So that's the journey that that that industry goes through every three, four years. And One of the interesting things about ah cellular and about 5G is that it's a technology that has a much, much longer time span compared to compared to Wi-Fi. So that that is sort of the third person of ah customers that we see. They say that, hey, if you can help me avoid these hardware refreshes that I'm having to do many times, that that would be awesome.
00:11:47
Manish Tiwari
So now let's talk about
Robotics and Private 5G Integration
00:11:49
Manish Tiwari
2026 a little bit. So as I was saying that we are still ah relatively early in the journey for enterprises to embrace cellular as ah as a core part of their network.
00:11:50
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:12:00
Manish Tiwari
ah there are There are a lot of interesting things happening and will continue to happen in 26 27. So one of the things that is ah continuing to happen is robotics. Either it is humanoid robots or it is ah ah video cameras that are increasingly being used with sophisticated AI algorithms to do predictive maintenance and things like that.
00:12:24
Manish Tiwari
ah That, I think, will continue to increase significantly. We have several new devices coming up um from both the companies that are making these robots, as well as the companies that make consumer devices getting launched next year and the year after that. So that will that will see, ah will that be an iPhone moment for private 5G? We don't know, but we can, I think, safely predict that the amount of traffic and the number of devices getting connected to private 5G networks will will continue to increase.
00:12:56
Manish Tiwari
And the the interesting part about these robots is that not only do they require a very predictive network to perform, but if they stop, then the cost of outage for the customers is very, very high.
00:13:11
Manish Tiwari
And that's a very interesting characteristic that we d and that we do see as a theme across multiple verticals, that customers deploy private five 5G ah
00:13:11
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah.
00:13:20
Manish Tiwari
and the customers who have the successful deployments are those who have very seriously thought about their three to five use cases that they want to start with. And they have done the analysis on the ah ROI impact of these three to five use cases.
00:13:34
Manish Tiwari
And one year later after deployment, if they have solved those three to five use cases, then suddenly the whole investment thesis makes a lot of sense and they they continue to scale and go globally. so With these robots coming into in industrial environments, I think we will see it becoming more clearer that there is a value in having a network that can support deterministic performance at the RF layer, it can support low latency use cases, and that can support high mobility when things move from one one direction to another.
00:13:57
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:14:04
Manish Tiwari
so that's ah That's a significant new area that I see improving.
Coexistence of Wireless Technologies
00:14:09
Manish Tiwari
The second area that I see is i don't see private 5G in isolation. I think you were talking about this earlier that we will have different flavors of wireless technologies in the enterprise. We will have Wi-Fi, we will have private 5G, we will also have public 5G because there are a lot of enterprises who do have a significant indoor coverage problem.
00:14:31
Manish Tiwari
And in fact, what we see in majority of our largest customers is the conversation either starts from, i have an indoor coverage problem because my employees and contractors and guests are not able to get any signal from the macro network in my warehouse or factory or office buildings and so on.
00:14:50
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:14:51
Manish Tiwari
So I need to solve that. And when we go about solving it, it automatically they they automatically discover new use cases that are better solved on a private 5G network. So it's either that customer journey or it happens in the other direction as well that we deploy a private 5G network. And during that time, the customer realizes that, hey, I have, and one of our customers has more than 20,000 employees and contractors and guests that enter their single facility every day.
00:15:18
Manish Tiwari
and not having a public network access in that building is a significant liability for that customer. So so they they would rather have both private 5G and public 5G or a neutral host network to solve that problem and get removed the liability associated with it.
00:15:34
Manish Tiwari
So we see all of all of these things coming together as as a trend ah in 2026 and beyond.
00:15:35
Pablo Tomasi
And
00:15:40
Manish Tiwari
And I think where this will, ah my my my hope is that where this will go is ah the network will become smart enough and intelligent enough to realize which application should run on which of these flavors of either 5G or Wi-Fi. I don't think Wi-Fi is going to go away anywhere. It will always stay. What might change is the refresh cycle of Wi-Fi because people would want to sweat that asset for a longer time rather than wanting to upgrade it every three, four years.
00:16:07
Pablo Tomasi
so So we can expect Wi-Fi refreshment cycle to then align with cellular if you want. It doesn't make sense to have a network that refreshes every two years and another one that stays 10 years without being refreshed.
00:16:18
Manish Tiwari
Exactly. Exactly.
00:16:20
Pablo Tomasi
But but I like what what you were mentioning about robotics. I think that's interesting because ah When you're talking about robotics, we need also to talk about AI, right? At least people that cover AI talk about AI with robotics. And I think that could be an interesting way of channel AI within a private 5G market, which otherwise kind of struggles a little bit to really feed off the hype, right? You have robotics, you need to have different processing of you know workloads applications in different parts of your system, you know the old good old-fashioned edge computing, wherever that happens. And I think private 5G can really play a role in that. So so hopefully that sort of robotics play plus AI can can play a good role.
00:17:03
Pablo Tomasi
And and and the other the other thing that ah sort of struck me, so when you were mentioning that the macronetwork may struggle indoor, and and i think that for a lot of large enterprises, that's a critical problem. Because again, the macronetwork is not designed you know, to to cover indoor as much as Telcos love to say that they have good coverage indoor.
00:17:26
Pablo Tomasi
reality
Solving Indoor Coverage and AI Applications
00:17:26
Pablo Tomasi
is that they don't. So that's a very great opportunity for you guys.
00:17:27
Manish Tiwari
Yeah.
00:17:31
Manish Tiwari
Yeah. I mean, it it it starts with that, right? That regardless of what flavor of 5G you use, whether it is private 5G or network slicing or public 5G or whatever flavor you use, the the first problem you have to solve is do do you have a strong signal strength inside inside a building?
00:17:47
Pablo Tomasi
Hmm.
00:17:49
Manish Tiwari
And I think there is enough data to show that majority of the buildings continue to struggle with having a strong indoor coverage. ah There has been, in fact, the industry has continued to use higher and higher frequencies, which makes it difficult for to penetrate the windows and the walls.
00:18:07
Manish Tiwari
ah The way the buildings are designed for energy efficiency and so on uses materials that makes it even more difficult for the signals to go inside. And therefore, we are at a point where there are a lot of enterprises who have concluded that they need to fund the infrastructure for indoor coverage. And and that that we are seeing across ah many verticals. Now, once you have solved that problem, then and let's say if you now you have a the private 5G and public 5G in place.
00:18:39
Manish Tiwari
Then what becomes interesting, you we talking you you were talking about AI, there are two flavors of AI that that we see. One is ah AI for operating the networks more efficiently, and one is AI use cases that run once the network is up and running and is is working well.
00:18:51
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:18:57
Manish Tiwari
So from the perspective of AI use cases that are running once the network is up and running, ah are We were talking about video cameras that are uploading a lot of video and then predictive maintenance happening through that. ah The robots that are becoming intelligent and they need a strong edge compute stack that is working alongside the robust connectivity for to make those use cases possible.
00:19:22
Manish Tiwari
So we do see those kind of use cases already running at scale in our customers. ah We have a healthcare customer that in Asia that is using a ah the private network to enable their surgeons to do surgery using Microsoft HoloLens is connected to the private 5G network. ah That same hospital is also using robots that go around and monitor patient vitals autonomously ah connected to the 5G network with no human involved at the front end. And the way you design these robotics changes because if you have a robust connectivity layer, you don't need as much cost and compute on the device itself. You can actually have some of the cost moved to the cloud or moved to the edge compute stack and make the device even lighter weight and have a lot more of those devices. So we some of the we see some of those changes happening in certain industries.
00:20:18
Manish Tiwari
ah and And then from the second perspective that, hey, what is what is the role of AI in terms of running the network?
AI's Role in Network Management
00:20:26
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:20:26
Manish Tiwari
it's it's ah It's a problem that we think about a lot and we spend a lot of time making sure that we are ah doing the work that is needed for these networks to be mission critical, to be business critical, to run with high reliability.
00:20:40
Manish Tiwari
Because as I was mentioning earlier, one of the themes that is very clear is customers love private 5G when they have use cases where the cost of outage is very high.
00:20:50
Manish Tiwari
And therefore, there is automatically an expectation on this network that appears to be significantly more rigorous and higher than the expectations that I had seen on Wi-Fi networks and and so on.
00:21:01
Manish Tiwari
Compared to other wireless technologies, the expectation on this technology is that it simply works and never goes down. And I can run my autonomous trucks on this technology in a mine, as an example, right? We have a customer that runs these...
00:21:16
Manish Tiwari
do I think we made public the name of that customer, Newmont Mines, that runs these autonomous dozers where every truck carries about 1400 tons of dirt.
00:21:28
Manish Tiwari
And there is no driver in that truck. it It's a big truck, right?
00:21:30
Pablo Tomasi
That's a big truck.
00:21:32
Manish Tiwari
I mean, if imagine that truck running on on a network remotely operated. and or or autonomously driving. And if there is any problem with connectivity, the safety protocols in that truck say that it will apply the brakes, it will stop in a period of about 10 seconds, and then someone has to drive down the mine, go to that truck and manually inspect it before it can start again.
00:21:55
Manish Tiwari
So the cost of operation of that disconnect event happening is pretty high. It's like it runs into hundreds of thousands and in some cases, and millions of dollars per hour.
00:22:00
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:22:04
Manish Tiwari
So ah that's the expectation from the network. And now in the order for that expectation to be met, AI plays a pretty critical role. So we have been investing a lot to make sure that different layers of the hardware and software stack are providing rich data that can be then analyzed through models to make sure that we can predict if something is going wrong in the network and when something is going wrong, where is it getting wrong going wrong?
00:22:29
Manish Tiwari
So I'll give you one example of this. ah We model standard behavior for every chipset and every device that we see around the world. And we know that if this device is working well, then this is the behavior we should see from this device from the perspective of the control plane interaction that we have with that device or the kind of traffic that we are supposed to see from that device and so on.
00:22:38
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:22:52
Manish Tiwari
but if it deviates from that then we can detect that this device has some issue uh it's showing some abnormal behavior which might be caused by a firmware update or something wrong happening in this device that we need to be aware of so that that device does not cause a problem for other devices or on the network so that's an example of using AI at scale to figure out when there's a problem in the network now it can happen at any any layer of the network So, one of the unique things that we have done, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about these integrated architectures versus disaggregated architectures, because there are multiple ways to build a private 5G network.
00:23:27
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah.
00:23:27
Manish Tiwari
But our view is that in order to support these kinds of use cases and these kinds of expectations from the network, you have to collect rich data from the RF layer, from the RAN layer, radio software layer, the core layer, the management layer, application layer, and so on.
00:23:42
Manish Tiwari
And when you have this data, then you can take advantage of AI to figure out where a potential issue might be and avoid that potential issue in advance to make sure the network performance does not degrade. So AI RAN has a value here. ah The network AI has a value here and so on. We are doing a lot of work in this area to make sure that at scale, we can support the most demanding applications in the largest of the networks around the world for these enterprises who are actually starting to depend on private 5G for their mission critical production environments.
Private 5G in Mining and Connectivity Needs
00:24:13
Pablo Tomasi
That's great. It's fascinating. and And I like the example that that you gave about the the mining, because I think that puts things in perspective, right? Because someone that doesn't really know too much about mines, they don't understand that you know maybe the person needs to drive like five minutes to actually get to to a truck, or even more.
00:24:32
Manish Tiwari
It's more than an hour, it's crazy. Someone has to go and manually check that truck and make sure that there is no mechanical fault in that truck before that truck is allowed to start again. This is regulation, this is the safety protocols and things like that. Because 1400 tons, you can imagine how how that vehicle would be in a single lane road that goes on the edge of a mine one kilometer deep and coming back up auto autonomously.
00:24:58
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah, that definitely is is the type of machine that you don't want you know having a problem or you know having to do too much work on it.
00:25:04
Manish Tiwari
yeah yeah
00:25:06
Pablo Tomasi
ah No, it's, ah yeah, it's i think it's ah is's good to see that the AI is is filtering through, right? and And a lot of what you were mentioning terms of sort of that AI for for the network, ah I think resonates as well from a sort of security posture, if you want. you know when When you're looking at everything, you get data from everything, then if something is not right,
00:25:26
Pablo Tomasi
you know you can flag some some tickets or or whatever it is. So quite quite exciting to see developments there. Now, if we move a little bit, sort of you have already mentioned a few examples of you know deployments that you have. I'm curious whether you have any any additional you know data point or story, lesson learned from a customer that you think is particularly relevant and that other enterprises you know should to really hear about. Because I think sharing these stories can really help the market because a lot of people, again, I may be working in a different industry, but I resonate you know with the same problem that you have. So any any other lesson that you can share with us?
Global Adoption of Private 5G
00:26:07
Manish Tiwari
Yeah, I think at at ah at a macro level at at this point, anybody who is a prospect prospective enterprise looking at private 5G as an option to solve a problem that might have that they might have, ah they should feel confident that in in the target verticals that everyone talks about, whether it is mining, oil and gas, transportation, energy, manufacturing, warehousing, verticals like these, um the top 15 to 20% enterprises have either already deployed private 5G or are in the process of evaluating private 5G pretty seriously to deploy it.
00:26:43
Manish Tiwari
And of course, there's a long tail beyond that. but that confidence everyone should have that this is not an experiment, this is actually a technology that is supporting global operations in production for a lot of large enterprises across these vertical sites.
00:26:57
Manish Tiwari
So that's where the industry is right now. Now, ah and we had our customer advisory board a few weeks ago and I got asked the same question. And I say that the first thing that every every prospect should think about is ah be very, very clear on your top three to five use cases.
00:27:14
Manish Tiwari
ah Because this is not a network that you invest in ah hoping that the traffic would come or the devices would come. You have to be very clear that here are the three problems that I have.
00:27:25
Manish Tiwari
These are business problems caused by poor connectivity.
00:27:26
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:27:29
Manish Tiwari
And if I had a network that could solve these three to five problems, I would have a very strong ah ROI in my business operations. so that could be like in manufacturing we hear from a lot of customers that hey my AGVs are stopping once in a while uh they are they have been running on wi-fi networks and ah once in a while i will have some problem and the AGV will stop and the AGV by the way follows the same protocol protocol when it stops it beeps and some person has to go to that AGV and manually reset it before it can start again So we have heard some customers tell us that this event of the beep and the AGV stopping was so frequent that the manufacturing floor workers started to ignore these beeps because they were part of the life.
00:28:14
Manish Tiwari
They happen all the time on on Wi-Fi networks. And then ah
00:28:17
Pablo Tomasi
The beauty of digital transformation, just ignore it, you know.
00:28:20
Manish Tiwari
Exactly. so And and i mean some of these customers, when they when they sort of went to and in the direction of private 5G a few months later, and we talked to them, they said, hey, the beeps have completely disappeared. And now if it ever happens, then we actually pay attention to it because it's a rare event and it's not as common of very as it used to be. So those kinds of stories are pretty interesting to hear. So three to five use cases, be very clear on what those use cases are.
00:28:43
Manish Tiwari
In fact, when you have a conversation with a vendor, talk to them about those three to five use cases and how do you ensure with very high confidence that those three to five use cases will be so successful.
00:28:54
Manish Tiwari
And then your business case will be rock solid and you will actually be happy with that investment a few months down the line. The second thing that I ask people to think about is the operational model. There are different kinds of enterprises and they ah like to have different kinds of operational models. so we have some enterprises that depend on our external systems integrator or a managed service provider to manage their networks.
00:29:15
Manish Tiwari
We have some others who want to do things on their own. So they would want to have a lot of tools, workflows, visibility, troubleshooting, things like that in the product itself so that the staff that they have can solve potential issues on their own.
00:29:31
Manish Tiwari
So that's sort of the second category. And then we have ah different different variants beyond that as well. So having clarity on the operational model, And considering that in your TCO calculation and making sure you're working with a company that can support these different operational models is is really important.
00:29:48
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
00:29:48
Manish Tiwari
ah
00:29:48
Pablo Tomasi
Mm-hmm.
Security and Compliance in Private 5G
00:29:49
Manish Tiwari
Many of these verticals are very security conscious, as you were talking about. ah We are talking about ah operations that in in many enterprises that get attacked by, I mean we have customers that get attacked by state and non-state actors and having a rock solid security stack, having a compliance approved offering is really important for these customers. So we have done a lot of work with some of these large enterprises to make sure that the architecture has undergone that scrutiny of being really secure. And if someone requires even more security, then we can go in that direction.
00:30:26
Manish Tiwari
So we have done a lot of work in the last couple of years to have ah flexible deployment models. We can manage networks from the cloud for customers who are okay with that. We can support local management for customers who require a little bit more security. We can even support isolated management for customers who want to completely disconnect from any kind of external environment. So we see different kinds of enterprises depending on what kind of operations they have and what scale they have ah wanting different levels of security and compliance.
00:30:57
Manish Tiwari
And also the security problem, you were talking about this earlier, I see that also as ah as a very as an emerging area ah for cellular networks going forward. Because what will happen is if you think about how security got implemented on cellular in enterprises so far,
00:31:16
Manish Tiwari
Majority of our cellular devices are user-owned devices. They are smartphones and tablets in the last 15 years. ah And these devices, when they leave the building, they go outside and connect to the public networks.
00:31:29
Manish Tiwari
We have depended on mobile device management to actually secure them. Every enterprise has ah has an MDM stack and we define the policy on that MDM stack and gets enforced on the smartphone. We are entering a world where IoT devices are going to leave the building and go outside and connect to the macro networks. These IoT devices are not going to have an MDM.
00:31:47
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah.
00:31:48
Manish Tiwari
So there is a new problem that is coming out on how do you ensure that enterprise policy and security stays intact for IoT devices that roam between public networks and private networks.
00:31:59
Manish Tiwari
So we have been doing a lot of work in this area to make sure that there is seamless experience, there is control in the hands of enterprise, but we can enforce the same policy and security on macro networks as well. So it requires a little bit of a tighter integration between private and public. So we are working with operators to to make sure that that is possible.
00:32:16
Pablo Tomasi
and and And that's the thats very interesting bit, right? Sort of the long term, know, sort of dream that that ah I've always thought about it with ah discussing this market is that it's not about having, you know, that only that isolated network, but it's about having that continuum. You know, you have the private network, you have the public network, you have Wi-Fi somewhere. and has to be continuous, has to be supported, and has to be critical, of course secure. And and when you're able to put everything sort of together, a bit of it like a puzzle, then then it becomes really, really powerful.
00:32:46
Pablo Tomasi
But since we're running out out of time, the last question I have for you, if you can quickly answer in one or two minutes, which is a little bit follow up from what we discussed in the last five
Advice on High ROI Use Cases
00:32:58
Pablo Tomasi
minutes or so. But you know do you have any recommendation for partners to make 2026 a successful year for them to, you know, help grow with Enterprise 5G What would you tell your partners to, you know, as ah as a as a freebie, you know, before Christmas for them?
00:33:18
Manish Tiwari
I think it depends on what you what role you have in the industry. right I think ah we all get impacted by macroeconomic changes. And I think all of us can can see that the the world at the highest level is going through a lot of macroeconomic turbulence over the last year, year and a half, and that continues.
00:33:37
Manish Tiwari
So it's hard to predict how that would ah ah sort of settle down or continue in 2026, but that will impact everyone in the industry, how that how that evolves, the macroeconomic situation. Because what ends up happening as a result of that is if you are a large enterprise or sort of an enterprise that is wanting to make a decision on whether I should invest in this network, It will depend on how that environment is progressing. If you're a partner trying to sell to a customer, that macroeconomic thing will impact your ability to be successful in in making that sale. um What I recommend to partners and ah folks who are in this industry is to ah have spend a lot of time upfront to make sure that the deployment
00:34:27
Manish Tiwari
has real use cases that are high ah ROI use cases for the customer. ah if And they don't have to be a lot of use cases. I can I I mean, I we were talking about three to five use cases.
00:34:39
Manish Tiwari
In 100% of our deployments, when we look at those networks one year down the line, there are more than three to five use cases running on them. But it is getting clarity on the first three to five that actually lead to that strong ah ROI and making them successful. So we try to make work with closely with our customers who do these deployments that their first three to five use cases are absolutely successful. Because beyond that, the network is a horizontal layer and you will always see more devices and more use cases connecting to it.
00:35:07
Manish Tiwari
But if you don't pay a lot of attention upfront on those first three to five, you will end up getting stalled. As a partner, as a customer, as an internal advocate for this, you will end up getting stalled if you can't demonstrate success on the first three to five use cases.
00:35:24
Manish Tiwari
So really important to spend time on those first three to five, really important to understand the ah ROI of it. And I almost say that the evaluation of whether to go in the direction of private 5G or not is a little bit different than how people think about Wi-Fi networks. In Wi-Fi networks, you don't do this exercise of, hey, what are my first three to five use cases?
00:35:44
Manish Tiwari
Because it is almost, ah I mean, it's it's like a cost structure for enterprise IT, right? every Everyone who comes in needs some sort of connectivity and that becomes default.
00:35:51
Pablo Tomasi
Yeah, you you kind of need it so you deploy it and that's it.
00:35:55
Manish Tiwari
utility right but this is not a priority is not like that it is it has to you have to be very clear on what your use cases are you have to be very clear on the ah roi and the business improvements you can drive if you solve those three use cases and then once you solve it what you will realize guaranteed one year down the line two year down line you will have a lot more use cases running on the network So when we look at ah our networks in our install base, we are seeing a significant increase across the board in the amount of uplink traffic that comes from these networks but on a per side basis in terms of number of devices that are connecting to these networks. So it is following a similar journey as Wi-Fi networks have followed for many years. But ah people who feel more confident about scaling from a single site to global deployments are those who have done a lot of work on their first few use cases and can make that internal justification one year down the line that, hey, I see strong ROI, now I need to scale globally.
00:36:55
Pablo Tomasi
Okay, So ah Manish, thank you very much for your time, for your expertise. Really appreciate your thoughts on what's going to to happen in 2026 and seems like an exciting year ahead. So again, Manish, thank you very much for joining me on the Telco Drift.
00:37:10
Manish Tiwari
Thank you, Pablo. Very good to talk to you. Thanks. Bye-bye.