The number of businesses and government entities deploying private wireless networks reached 955 in the third quarter of 2022, compared with 889 at the end of June and 726 at the end of 2021, according to the study.
Jamaica and the Central African Republic reported their first private networks during the final months of 2022 and with their addition, there are now 72 countries that have private wireless networks. The markets with the most deployments are currently the US, Germany, China, the UK and Japan - all countries where authorities have allocated dedicated licensed spectrum for such rollouts.
During the third quarter, mining, defence and peacekeeping, and manufacturing were the fastest-growing industry sectors in terms of private wireless network adoption.
From a deployed technology perspective, organisations “still favour LTE [4G]”, with the technology being used in 711 (75%) of the 955 deployments identified by the GSA, while 5G has been used by 391 (40.9%) of deployments.
GSA president Joe Barrett said: ““We’re witnessing a steady growth in private mobile network deployments on various levels with LTE and 5G both gaining traction and with countries all over the world actively deploying the technologies.
“Wireless networking with LTE or 5G enables these transformations to take place even in the most dynamic, remote or highly secure environments, while offering the scale benefits of a technology that has already been deployed worldwide.”
In the past year, several major telecoms groups have introduced private networks including Vodafone Business’s partnership with Porsche on a 5G hybrid mobile private network, Federated Wireless working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on private wireless deployments and Telstra’s collaboration with Ericsson to deploy a 5G network slicing service orchestration capability.
