Amazon announced a new service that allows the deployment of your own 5G private wireless network. Amazon’s private 5G network lowers cost and simplifies deployment, allowing customers to build their own 5G network, rapidly scale up and down the number of connected devices, and benefit from an on-demand cloud pricing model.
Amazon 5G will allow users to take advantage of speeds up to 100 times higher than 5G can eventually offer. For business customers, this means they can work more efficiently and increase overall production, something especially needed in today’s supply chain impacted economy.
AT&T CEO John Stankey and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg largely dismissed Amazon 5G as a competitive threat to their respective 5G services. He characterized AWS’s Private 5G as an offering suitable for simple businesses that don’t have multiple locations. However, Amazon commands so much power and influence the cloud giant is bound to negatively impact some businesses when it enters the 5G market. It appears that both AT&T and Verizon don’t want to send the message that they’re at all threatened by AWS’s Private 5G.
Neville Ray, the executive in charge of T-Mobile’s five-year, $60 billion 5G network upgrade program, mentioned that T-Mobile is leading in other aspects of 5G. For example, he said T-Mobile plans to deploy its 5G services across 200MHz of mid-band spectrum by the end of 2023. In his “Current State of 5G” blog post, he mentions that by the end of 2023, T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G is expected to reach nearly 285 million people. It appears he also doesn’t want to send the message that AWS’s Private 5G threatens T-Mobile.
Dish Network could be a wild card when it gets up and gets rolling. It could be a natural partner with Amazon and was actually named during Amazon’s announcement of their new 5G services.
