If you’ve looked seriously at private 5G and quietly backed away, you’re not alone. For many enterprise IT teams, private 5G feels like opening the door to a telco-scale project: racks of unfamiliar gear, specialised RF design, new cabling runs, and an operating model that looks nothing like the rest of the network. That friction is often enough to kill momentum before a deployment even begins. However, here’s the uncomfortable truth: private 5G itself isn’t the problem. The way it’s traditionally been packaged and delivered is.
The real reason private 5G feels complex
Most early private 5G solutions were lifted straight from service-provider architectures. Those designs assume dedicated facilities, trained RF teams, and greenfield deployments. Enterprises don’t work that way.
Traditional RAN architectures split functionality across centralised baseband units, distributed units, radio heads, and dedicated Layer2/3 switching. Each piece brings its own power, space, cabling, and redundancy requirements. In an industrial facility where rack space is already tight, and cabling runs can span large outdoor areas, this becomes disruptive fast.
The complexity isn’t theoretical. Every new dependency becomes another failure point, another thing to maintain, and another reason operations teams push back.
Why enterprises don’t want a “cellular island”
Drop a telco-style private 5G network into an existing LAN, and you’ve effectively built a parallel universe. Separate switches. Separate routers. Separate firewalls. Separate operating tools.
From an enterprise perspective, that’s not innovation, it’s fragmentation. IT teams don’t want a standalone cellular network that behaves differently from the rest of their systems. They want private 5G to deploy likeWi-Fi: plug into existing switches, use existing cabling, and become just another access layer in the network.
A simpler architectural approach
One way to remove this friction is to collapse the radio access network itself. Instead of disaggregated components, an AP-only architecture integrates the radio, baseband processing, and scheduling into a single small cell.
There are no centralised baseband shelves. No external distributed units. No dedicated Layer 2 or Layer 3 switching fabric. For indoor deployments, radios can be powered over Ethernet, meaning a single Cat6 cable delivers both power and data.
The practical impact is significant:
- No special cabling runs
- No extra rack space
- No parallel switching infrastructure
- No separate on-prem cellular core footprint
What “deploys like Wi-Fi” actually means
When private 5G radios connect directly into existing access switches, the deployment model changes completely. You’re extending the LAN, not bolting on a second network. The cellular control plane is centrally managed by an orchestrator, but the data plane lives inside the LAN, where enterprise traffic already resides.
This architectural shift enables private 5G to scale without operational friction in industrial environments.
A simple decision framework
Before you commit to a private 5G design, ask:
- Does it require new racks, switches, or dedicated cabling?
- Does it operate as a parallel network separate from your LAN?
- Does it introduce a new operational model?
- Can it integrate into your existing LAN routing and security policies?
If the answer to the first three is “yes” and the last is“no”, complexity isn’t an accident, it’s baked in.
What to do next
Private 5G doesn’t have to feel like a telco project. Start by challenging the architecture, not the use case. If it can’t integrate cleanly into your enterprise network from day one, it will struggle to scale later.
