Why Do Utilities Need Private Networks?

Utilities have used private networks for many decades, long before public wireless carriers existed. While public carriers make communications easier and more accessible, mission critical use cases still require private communications in order to meet four specific requirements:

SECURITY | Safety and protection are of primary importance, for employees as well as the public, since extreme harm can result if a mission-critical infrastructure is hacked in any way. Access to the network needs to be restricted to ensure only authorized personnel can get into the network, and data transmissions need to be encrypted, to prevent tampering, theft, or, worse yet, acts of sabotage or terrorism.

RELIABILITY | Communication with personnel and devices needs to go through, without interference, even if transmission and reception take place in rural or remote areas.

AVAILABILITY | These critical networks cannot afford down time. The goal of 100% network availability may only be attainable in theory, but a standard for today’s mission-critical networks is 99.999% availability, which equates to five minutes of downtime per year. Few, if any commercial networks offer this level of availability. Even 99.99% availability, which equates to 52 minutes of downtime per year, is not a level of service commercial carriers and their publicly available, consumer focused network products are willing to provide.

LATENCY | Control and signaling communications sent to and from remote devices must be delivered without delay, at extremely low latency rates. When performing tasks such as remotely controlling oil or gas flow and equipment, switching a power line, controlling a circuit breaker, or sending a stop command to an out-of-control train, the signal needs to be transmitted in a fraction of a second, but commercial networks can never guarantee latency rates this low.

Commercial public cellular networks simply don’t offer the levels of reliability, availability, latency, and security that mission-critical services require. Designed primarily for the consumer market, commercial cellular networks tend to focus the majority of their resources on urban, more populated areas, where consumers use high-bandwidth connections.