Private 5G: an emerging component in the industry of the future

Recovering from a tentative start, private 5G is attracting growing interest right across the industrial sector. Is now the time for an acceleration? This technology opens up unprecedented prospects in performance and security.

With the industrial sovereignty issue having fuelled public discourse in France for the past five years or more, in 2024, the country confirmed its Europe-leading position in new factory installations and expansions (source).

This attractiveness is derived from a combination of factors: internal market strength; healthy levels of innovation and R&D; availability of skilled workforces; and high-quality transport, energy and communications infrastructure.

A key component in the factory of the future

To maintain this foundation, the industrial sector is focused on digitalising its activities, including with the development of private 5G. However, while mobile 5G has found its place with individual users since its launch five years ago (over 25 million people use it daily), it has scarcely made a dent in the professional industrial sphere.

And yet this technology is being presented as a key component in the factory of the future, which is itself hailed as a lever for the competitiveness and relocation of French industry.

Public authorities are also taking a keen interest. The government has included private 5G in its Industry Recovery Plan, and in 2021, launched an Industrial 5G Mission. In early 2023, stating that the cost of mobile spectrum licensing fees was preventing manufacturers from converting to private 5G networks, the French telecommunications authority ARCEP significantly lowered acquisition fees – in some cases by a factor of over 100 for small areas.

Nevertheless, despite these efforts, very few businesses have taken the plunge. Those that have include: Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) in Calais; and ArcelorMittal in Dunkirk, Mardyck and across the Hauts-de-France region. “The CAPEX [capital investment expenditure] for private 5G is significant,” says Antoine Béron, Brand Business Support & Development Director at Actemium, the VINCI Energies industry brand. “The market will initially take shape around a few heavy industries.”

Critical advantages

The advantages of industrial 5G are well known: high bandwidth (at least 10 times that of 4G), latency in the order of one millisecond, capacity for a million connected objects per square kilometre, and improved cybersecurity.

“We are seeing increasingly pronounced interest in this technology.”

In fact, 5G is the first technology to be compatible with real-time “critical communications”. While wireless technologies such as Wi‑Fi have notable failings, especially in environments containing metals (e.g. oil platforms, Faraday cages), 5G-based applications can operate wirelessly with total reliability. Applied to remotely controlled cranes, mobile robots, high-precision monitoring systems and drones, among others, the benefits for indoor and outdoor industrial sites are obvious.

Reducing the risks of disconnection

From energy firms and steel makers to warehouse logistics specialists, every single one of these groups will have considered a switch to private 5G. Industrial environments such as automotive and aeronautical manufacturing, which combine productivity with high precision, are fertile ground for the rollout of private networks.

“On assembly lines where minor variations, in the order of tenths of a second, can compromise product quality, 5G’s continuous signal avoids any risk of even the briefest disconnection,” argues Nicolas Beaufort, Head of Private Mobile Networks at VINCI Energies. “It avoids having to stop production lines for upgrades. Scaled up to the volumes being produced, this translates immediately into economic value.”

Another key advantage of 5G is its frequency control, which is essential for ensuring performance and stability in industrial systems. “The subdivision of networks allows their owners to define multiple virtual segments on shared physical infrastructure and optimise each of them to specific use cases,” explains Antoine Béron. “As the sole administrators of their networks, businesses can define different levels of priority access according to their needs.”

In the event of a personnel safety alert, evacuation orders can without fail be transmitted to employees, wherever on the site they may be. This is a valuable draw for critical industries such as the nuclear sector, which is keenly interested in this technology, with various projects currently under way on sites administered by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). he French national radioactive waste management agency is working to roll out a network extending as far as 600 metres underground.

“Until now, the task of gathering and compiling technical and scientific data from deeply buried waste has fallen to human operators,” says Nicolas Beaufort. “With 5G, we will be able to entrust this work to robots equipped with sensors.”

Private 5G could also quickly find applications in environments generally considered relatively inaccessible to communications networks. Undersea drones are already in testing for tasks relating to inspection, maintenance and security.

POC for the large, EIG for the small

Nicolas Beaufort finds the situation quite clear: “We are seeing increasingly pronounced interest in this technology.” He continues: “Manufacturers generally consider switching when they launch a project to modernise or consolidate an existing Wi‑Fi network. Most often, they initially issue calls for tenders limited to between €100,000 and €400,000 for a POC, which logically should quickly progress to contracts ten times larger.”

But what about industrial SMEs? Do the weight of investment required to implement private networks and the less naturally eligible environments and use cases exclude smaller sites from the promise of 5G? “The technology is currently still too expensive for SMEs,” says Nicolas Beaufort. “But we are already seeing the formation of economic interest groupings. Recently, 22 SMEs got together to jointly issue a call for tenders.”

However quickly industrial 5G is implemented, its expansion requires close collaboration between industrial sectors, telecoms providers and equipment suppliers, with particular attention to the technical, ethical and security challenges.

03/16/2026