Private 5G: Two different approaches at the Coronation

This post originally appeared on June 9 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)

 A month ago, the UK and much of the world watched King Charles' #Coronation in London.

They were able to watch it partly because of the immense efforts of the various #broadcasters involved. Since then, two separate stories have emerged about the role of dedicated #5G connectivity in the TV coverage:

1) A dedicated private 5G network supplied by Neutral Wireless and BBC R&D, used by several broadcasters
2) A slice of the Vodafone public 5G network, enabled for ITN, based on Ericsson gear

In the comments I've linked to various articles and a great interview on Ericsson's Voice of 5G podcast show. They have details of the other partners involved too. In the BBC blog post they also mention a 3rd network on a separate cell, working alongside Sony, for low-latency (I think) remote-controlled cameras.

The #Private 5G network used 8 radios along The Mall (the tree-lined road between Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Sq). It used 2x 40MHz channels in the UK's shared-licence band between 3.8-4.2GHz, with 1Gbps capacity (mostly for uplink). It was used by around 60 devices - I guess mostly cameras and test equipment via gateways, plus the BBC's onsite radio studio. They also used LiveU bonding systems to add capacity from public MNO networks. I'm not sure about the vendors of the radios or standalone core.

The 5G SA #networkslicing solution was apparently used for a single sector at a 3.5GHz temporary base station aimed at the Palace balcony. It also worked with LiveU. On the podcast, Andrea Donà (VF's head of network in the UK) talks about "dedicating bandwidth to one sector for the slice" and carving out some of the uplink capacity.

One thing that is unclear to me is how many other users were sharing the VF standalone 5G network hosting the slice - SA hasn't been fully launched commercially in the UK, although in January VF said it had invited selected users to trial it. I also don't know whether the 5G NSA and SA networks were sharing the radio resource, or if they use separate channels.

The public 4G / 5G networks (and also Wi-Fi bands) in the area were pretty overloaded, despite additional mobile towers adding capacity. The Vodafone / Ericsson podcast notes that VF uses "all the bands" at major events (although there's no #mmWave 5G in the UK yet) - so including 4G at 2.1GHz and 2.6GHz, and some lower bands for 2G/3G.

My take from this is that #private5G is considerably more mature than #5Gslicing, but that both are interesting for broadcasters. Both need quite a lot of specialist engineering, but TV is a sector with lots of very clever specialists and great ability to set up temporary networks. Of course, both networks were *outdoors* which meant that the thick stonework of the palace and Westminster Abbey weren't relevant.

One last note - the huge bulk of broadcast audiovisual output at the coronation would have used dedicated #PMSE wireless for cameras and microphones. But the #UHF spectrum debate is for another post.

 

Is there a potential market for 5G or other connectivity insurance policies?

[Reposted & slightly extended from my LinkedIn post here - see that page for some really good discussion in the comments]

This is a completely speculative post, on an area I’ll happily admit I know little about. It might be complete nonsense, or it could be a billion-dollar idea. Or it could be trivial & exist already with a different name. 

So: What happens if you blend radio spectrum policy & licenses, and 5G or WiFi networks, with the insurance industry? 

Is there a potential market for insuring radio networks against failures (interference, coverage gaps, latency etc), especially in enterprise environments? 

Or insurance against interfering with others' networks in shared spectrum like CBRS? (Sort of like radio liability insurance)

At the moment there is huge wariness by conventional operators or vendors in offering full SLAs, especially in mission-critical environments. Understandably, on the other hand very few users or developers will want to risk their mission critical (or possibly safety-critical) applications on networks that could fail. They're certainly not likely to pay much extra for a "slice" or QoS guarantee that has no penalties for failure.

Few existing incumbent spectrum-holders will be willing to share their bands, without governments forcing them to, either. Could a C-Band satellite operate be satisfied that their links would be interference-free, if mobile networks were allowed partial access to the band?

Insurance could offset some of these risks - although it would likely need more data and better measurement in order to calculate premiums.

Regulators typically focus on worst-case scenarios, rather than probabalistic ones. Insurance could put a price on problems, and enable more efficient use of spectrum resources. 

The insurance industry is good at modelling risks, and costs of various types of failure or problem. As well as familiar forms of insurance that pay for a replacement car or house if damage is incurred, some pay out based on specific measurable parameters, such as wind-speeds of a certain strength in a given place. This is called "parametric insurance" -
well-explained here by Swiss Re ("The key criteria for an insurable trigger is that it is fortuitous and it can be modelled”) or in this article.

This could be a huge & beneficial area, if my gut feeling is correct. It's not easy - and various of the LinkedIn comments highlight complexities and problems. But it seems to me that there could be something here, at least in situations where network coverage/performance can be both modelled and measured. There are various other intersections & use-cases I can think of too. 

Comments welcome! 

(Also: a hat-tip to Richard Womersley of LSTelcom, who I discussed this with briefly about 18 months ago).