Written by Kelly Hill for RCR Wireless
A new survey of enterprises interested in adopting private networks lays out two primary reasons that they want to do so—and it’s not driven by vertical-specific, high-performance use cases.
Instead, they see the primary value of private networks as providing increased security and network reliability.
“While maybe we thought in advance that they might be thinking of a new business case or some types of specific savings, in reality, by a large percentage, increased security and network reliability stood out,” said Stephen Douglas, head of market strategy for Spirent Communications, which commissioned the survey conducted by STL Partners.
“They saw these capabilities as fundamental table stakes to enable any kind of real, mission-critical use case that they wanted to achieve,” Douglas explained. “If they didn’t have this level of increased security, if they didn’t have guaranteed network reliability, many use cases they were looking to implement or adopt simply couldn’t be done.”
In other words, enterprises want to be certain that new private networks will actually provide a reliable and safe network usage environment, before they’ll jump into more advanced uses of such networks.
The new report is based on a survey of around 200 enterprises of various sizes, conducted late last year by STL Partners. Douglas said that the survey was prompted by Spirent’s service provider customers, who were seeking “a detailed understanding of what enterprises would be looking for in terms of use cases, SLA requirements around private networks,” specifically in the sectors of finance, oil and gas, transportation and logistics and manufacturing—which are seen as the most advanced in terms of willingness to adopt private networks.
