Organisations are discovering that private networks allow them to implement clever new ideas and applications much more easily, and this is a burgeoning growing industry.

For the mobile operators, the largely untapped private network market represents untapped railway freight. Even taking a small slice of this market would enhance their value.

One example can be found in the Port of Southampton, which is installing a sophisticated private 5G network – only there, the operator partner is not EE or Vodafone, but the American behemoth, Verizon. 

The City has placed its bets on who might benefit from this revolution – and it isn’t the mobile operators. Even the faintest homeopathic trace of increased capital expenditure is detected by the City, and duly punished.

This perception may not be entirely fair. It may under-estimate the operators ability to transform themselves and adapt.

Vodafone has done a competent job at the internet of things (IoT), and recently announced it would open up new network programming interfaces, or APIs, and hire 7,000 software engineers in Europe.

That’s exactly what a company that is shifting its focus towards corporate customers should be doing.

The mobile industry also added a long laundry list of new corporate services to the 5G standards books, which was supposed to give the operators a front seat in the network revolution and accelerate their march into business services.

Only a protracted delay in implementing these technologies, along with supply chain issues caused by zero-Covid China, has seen this stall.

A major credibility problem for the networks remains. Network customers typically demand tough quality of service guarantees from their providers, and the consumer-focused operators don’t really have a track record of providing them – and they’re extremely reluctant to start now.

The telco mindset is also need of a transformation, too.

Operators are obsessed with reducing churn and cost – which is quite different to the entrepreneurial, fast moving and customer-focused approach that’s needed to succeed in the private network market.

“A bit more realism and humility is required,” says analyst Dean Bubley, a sympathetic but often scathing critic of the industry. “The enterprise bit of telcos should offer to partner to create and build bespoke networks.”

There are even mutterings in the City that the mobile operators should cease bidding for any new spectrum, becoming more like Thames Water than Tesla Motors. That doesn’t seem rational – but the knives are out.

Andrew Orlowski tweets at @andreworlowski