The promise of private 5G has been touted as offering multiple advantages for enterprises, but AWS seems to be giving up its bet on the technology: The company has retired its private 5G offering, first announced three and a half years ago.
AWS announced the offering at AWS re:Invent in November 2021. It was a managed, pay-as-you-go service that allowed enterprises to deploy, operate, and scale on-premises private mobile networks. Customers specified where to build the mobile network and its required capacity, and AWS provided and maintained critical components including servers, small-cell radio units, 5G-core and RAN software, and SIM cards.
The cloud giant published an update this week announcing that AWS Private 5G has reached the its end of support and could no longer be accessed.
According to an AWS spokesperson, the company based the move on a number of factors.
“While the goal behind AWS Private 5G was to make it easy for enterprises to deploy private mobile networks, several challenges limited AWS’s ability to execute against the original vision for customers, including limited wireless spectrum availability and reliance on third party hardware,” the spokesperson said. “After evaluating customer usage and feedback, AWS determined that customers were increasingly gravitating toward other solutions that better aligned with their needs.”
‘More like a strategic realignment’
Private 5G is increasingly being used in local area networks (LANs) in settings such as corporate buildings and campuses, warehouses, factories and other venues. Vendors point to its improved security and reliability, lower latency, greater capacity, better customization, and other benefits.
While its 5G service is gone, the company is continuing to offer Integrated Private Wireless (IPW) on AWS, which connects customers with its partner communication service providers’ private 5G and 4G LTE networks.
“This feels less like a retreat and more like a strategic realignment,” said Mike Leibovitz, Gartner research analyst covering enterprise networking.
AWS will likely shift more to the partnership-driven IPW, he noted. “It may be a pragmatic move to address cited spectrum and hardware challenges while staying active in the private wireless space.”
Private 5G a ‘massive opportunity’
That’s not to say that interest in private 5G is going away; quite the contrary, according to reports. Dell’Oro Group found that private wireless radio access network (RAN) revenues ended much higher than expected in 2024, growing more than 40%.
“It is still early in the private 5G journey [and] it will take some time before enterprise spending will move the larger RAN needle,” Stefan Pongratz, Dell’Oro Group VP, said in a recent report. However, private wireless “moved above the noise” last year, representing roughly 3% to 5% of total RAN, he noted.
Still, the firm noted: “Private wireless is a massive opportunity, but it will take some time for enterprises to embrace private cellular technologies.” Dell’Oro lists Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson as the top private wireless RAN providers. Other key players include Verizon, Samsung, ZTE Corporation, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom Group, Juniper Networks, Cisco, NTT, and Celona.
“When AWS launched their Private 5G service, there was a lot of hype around disrupting legacy telcos and subsequent interest from our clients,” said Andrew Lerner, Gartner distinguished VP analyst covering enterprise networking. “However, fast forward to now, and AWS is not prominently mentioned by our clients when evaluating private 5G.”
While Gartner does see interest from enterprise clients in private 5G, it is typically limited to specific use cases such as high performance, ultra-low latency, and support for non-IT devices, Lerner noted.
AWS improving EOL communication
More broadly, according to the AWS spokesperson, when AWS decides to retire a service or feature, it is typically because its capabilities are better addressed by newer AWS solutions or offerings from its partner network.
“In making such decisions, our priority is to provide customers with guidance on available alternatives — whether they are AWS solutions or partner offerings — along with how to migrate their workloads seamlessly, ensuring minimal interruption to their operations,” the spokesperson said.
While it was a relatively quiet product retirement, it wasn’t as abrupt as some have been in the past, experts noted.
In general, AWS deprecation and announcement of end-of-life for services has been a “major frustration” for customers due to the company’s lack of communication, noted Jim Hare, Gartner distinguished VP analyst for analytics and AI.
He pointed out that sometimes customers didn’t discover that a service was terminated until they saw a banner in documentation that included scant additional information.
However, AWS has improved its service and end-of-life communication, recently launching a dedicated webpage identifying deprecations along with migration paths and end dates.
“This change highlights that they are listening to customers and owning up to the mistakes of their past,” said Hare.
Source:: Network World