As always, opinions differ about the amount of market share the new AWS Private 5G offer will take. Amazon Web Services says it is a pre-packaged offer aimed at smaller organizations. AT&T seems to agree, at least for the moment, saying its own offers are aimed at more-complicated use cases.
Predictably, Verizon says it is not worried about AWS Private 5G. Ignore for the moment that this is what always is said when a new competitor enters a market. Ignore for the moment the typical attack profile, which is for a competitor to start out on the low end of the market, then gradually add more features and robustness, eventually creating a product able to compete at every level of the market.
One might make the same observation about AWS Cloud WAN, which offers a “managed wide area network (WAN) service that makes it faster and easier for enterprises to build, manage, and monitor a unified global network that seamlessly connects cloud and on-premises environments,” says Amazon Web Services.
Early deployment data shows that mobile operators already compete with the expected range of competitors, including system integrators, do it yourself, specialist providers and–perhaps most importantly–mobile infrastructure providers.
In the third quarter of 2021, mobile operators supplied a significant number of private 5G networks for which data was available, according to Analysys Mason. Still, infrastructure providers supplied the greatest number of networks.
The point is that private 5G already is supplied by a range of contestants. AWS is simply the latest new entrant. And while future trends may unfold in a different pattern, mobile operators are today the second-largest provider of private 5G networks.
And there is at least some evidence of significant demand for mobile operator supply of private 5G networks.
