The best strategy — public or private?

Mobility can boost productivity, employee satisfaction and automation, but when the end-goal is wireless connectivity, what's the smartest way to deploy the capability?

The combination of applications and telecommunications networks is reshaping and in some cases completely disrupting all manner of everyday life through real-time and location-based services, enhancing everything from taxi, tram and bus schedules, to parcel delivery tracking and OHS. These capabilities apply also to agricultural businesses, resources and transport companies, and utilities and government agencies.

As well as employee satisfaction and safety, the coupling of applications and the mobile network is enabling a sharper response by enterprise and government through the use of private voice, voice and data, or data only private networks.

But mobility can do so much more as radio, wireless backhaul and LTE converge to provide enterprise and government a third option to improve outcomes beyond the use of public networks or class spectrum licences — privately licensed spectrum.

Traditionally, private networks in metro, regional and rural areas in Australia have relied mostly on public networks, or unlicensed spectrum for data services, and public or licensed spectrum for narrowband voice services. As users gain experience of value extraction and cost control approaches, initial designs and networks may be modified to achieve the actual service and cost levels demanded by the business case. 'Second time' or experienced customers better understand their business drivers and in many cases can confidently consider a private solution.

Companies that run applications on public networks are increasingly seeing the value of private networks that deliver applications on an exclusive, licensed-spectrum basis.

Fundamentally, it's a matter of cost and control — a customer may not have full public network coverage of their field work area, so some other strategy is required to meet the business goal, and that's generally a private network since only it can align outcome and cost. Or, existing network approaches may be cost prohibitive at the bandwidth or transaction rates now required; so again, some other strategy is required, generally a private network aligned to business need.

Finally, if shared access wireless connectivity has been deployed, it may become evident that the shared network is a 'best efforts, when available' type of resource rather than enterprise or mission-critical grade, again trending towards control of destiny through a private network.

Frictionless information exchange between the network and remote devices lies at the heart of ambitions for the emerging mobility standard 5G, which will eventually improve mobile network operators' capacity to support mobility and commercial IoT and M2M deployments. 5G will mark a crucial step in the mobile journey. The catch? It won't be commercially available until at least 2020.

In the meantime, organisations can choose between public and shared networks that meet part of tomorrow's promise or a private network over which they have more control. Investment in the latter means costs can be allocated to the specific business unit, giving the enterprise control over its performance, efficiency and effectiveness, as well as transparency of any trade-offs, and delivering unparalleled accountability.

David Cooke is Group Manager, Telecommunications, at NEC Australia. NEC will be exhibiting at Comms Connect Melbourne in December on stand 71.