Telefónica’s German CEO, Markus Haas, has called for the allocation of 5G campus networks to mobile network operators. “It would make sense to give these frequencies to the mobile network operators, who could provide more capacity and higher data speeds in the short term” Haas told the Welt am Sonntag.
The German Federal Network Agency had previously reserved a portion of the 5G spectrum for industrial companies and research institutions to build smaller internal networks, with the operators only paying a administrative fee. However, Haas argued that this was a valuable national resource that was being underutilized. “There were fewer than 500 applications for very small-scale applications of these campus networks” he said. “Sometimes a single airport or a small corporate campus would be covered, but the rest of the area in Germany, and we’re talking about almost 99.9% of the country, would not be used for these frequencies.”
Haas described the experiment as a failure, as many companies had shown little interest in building their own networks. The Ministry of Digital and Transport has recently launched a survey to gauge the actual demand for campus networks, and Haas suggested that the results should be waited for before making a decision.
As an alternative, Haas proposed that mobile operators could offer a local network slice, a separate and isolated network area, with guaranteed capacities. He also floated the idea of an “opt-out” model, where companies could have a local network disconnected from the main network.
Prior to the last frequency auction, companies had requested their own campus networks to, among other things, connect their production lines and protect valuable data from third-party access. Many companies, including Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi, as well as BASF and Siemens, had planned to build their own networks. However, many companies also cooperate with mobile operators Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Telefónica in the operation of campus networks.