Not yet a perfect sweet spot

Private LTE may be everything-rolled-into-one – low latency, higher security, seamless connectivity, and wider coverage – but there are creases that still need to be ironed out

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

What is cheaper? Building your own bathtub, a swimming pool, or a pond good enough for a kayak?

The answers would always vary. They will change when it is a weekend getaway with just your family and when it is a big corporate camp-out party. Also, how often do you need it? At what scale? At what fixed cost and maintenance burden? It is easier to scrub a tub, but not that much fun to clean a lot of plankton and algae.

So, sympathies to those enterprises that have been wavering between the local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN). Or those that could not afford the number of base stations that a good Wi-Fi needed, or the connectivity interruptions it was dotted with.

These enterprises must have found a special reason to cheer up when the word private long-term evolution (private LTE) was first tossed about. The idea sounds perfect. It is a local cellular network strapped with local cell sites, micro towers, and core network servers that are dedicated to the needs of a specifically located organization and caters to that perimeter only. It is just the kind of network that an education campus, airport, stadium, amusement park, mall, seaport, mine, factory, township, or smart city could ask for.