Amazon launches AWS Private 5G
The ever growing giant that is Amazon recently launched a new service in their AWS (Amazon Web Services) division – AWS Private 5G. According to senior writer Paul Sawers at TechCrunch, “AWS has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own private 5G networks — eventually, at least.” This means that despite it’s name, AWS Private 5G currently only supports 4G LTE today, with the intentions to support 5G in the future. Sawers notes in terms of costs, it will be similar to their current structure. AWS charges $10 per hour for each radio unit it installs, with each radio supporting speeds of 150 Mbps across up to 100 SIMs (i.e. individual devices). AWS will bill for all data that transfers outwards to the internet, charged at Amazon’s usual EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) rates.
There is no doubt that 5G is the future of connectivity and it will only get better from there. But public 5G, which is what most consumers use with their compatible devices, have limited coverage and the bandwidth may be shared by million of users. With a private 5G, which AWS is offering, Sawers explains that it “uses Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared 3.5 GHz wireless spectrum that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorized in early 2020 for use in commercial environments, as it had previously been reserved for the Department of Defense (DoD). So this update essentially opened CBRS to myriad use-cases, including businesses looking to build new 5G services, or extend existing 4G/LTE services.” This is the key component, he says, of the new AWS private 5G service — it’s fully-integrated into the SAS administration process, with AWS managing everything on behalf of the customer, including taking on responsibility for interference issues among other troubleshooting tidbits relating to spectrum access. It may be some time, however, before the actual 5G service will be offered by AWS, but the platform launch hopes to serve as a promise for the future deployment of the service.
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