Amazon starts selling private 5G, plants flag on pricing

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it’s now officially selling private wireless 5G services — and the company is promising offerings that cost just a few thousand dollars per month.

For example, the company said a university might pay just $14,000 for a complete network setup supporting 100 staff members with tablets and three months of service. Similarly, AWS said a construction company might pay just $14,400 for three months of service in order to run security cameras across three floors of a building for eight hours each day.

However, the company is also charging $10 per hour, with a minimum 60-day commitment, for each radio it supports. Some critics, including those from private wireless networking startup Celona, argued that kind of pricing could be “cost prohibitive” to enterprise customers deploying multiple radios for a more permanent operation.

The cloud computing vendor also included plenty of caveats with its offering, noting the product is still in development and will be fleshed out in the coming months and years. AWS said the service is currently only available in its US East (Ohio), US East (Virginia), and US West (Oregon) regions. The company also said it’s not yet supporting an on-premise deployment of a core network. Instead, AWS said customers today can only run their core network operations inside a nearby AWS cloud computing region.

AWS said its “private 5G” service actually only runs on 4G LTE connections today. “The service supports LTE core and LTE radio units operating in the CBRS band, giving you the ability to connect your devices that support CBRS (LTE band 48) such as smartphones, tablets, Ethernet bridges, gateways, dongles, industrial CPE, and routers,” AWS wrote on its website. “However, AWS Private 5G is built using a 5G service-based architecture (SBA), where 3GPP decomposed the core into network functions. With the SBA architecture, you can derive the benefits of private mobile networks today and seamlessly shift to 5G in the future.”

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