Quick Answer: Airport private 5G is moving from an operations network to a tenant service. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) runs Private 5G across its campus, and the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) plans to share it with airlines, concessionaires and other partners. Four constraints decide whether tenants sign: the anchor airline may already run on a national carrier’s network slice, shared-tier spectrum cannot back hard service guarantees, tenants can build competing networks, and federal grant assurances limit what a federally funded airport can charge. Paris runs a version of that model on 4G, with shared radios and separate cores. Integrators who design the tenant offer first, with tiered service level agreements (SLAs) and a defensible rate card, win the tenant work after the build.
53% of airports now apply artificial intelligence (AI) to the aircraft turnaround, up from 36% in 2024, while only 17% of airlines monitor that same turn with AI in real time, according to SITA’s 2025 Air Transport IT Insights report.
The reason shows up in the hardware around any gate. The check-in cart may sit on the airport’s network while the ramp agent’s handheld runs on whichever carrier the airline signed nationally. Down on the stand, a camera feeds a turnaround platform that the airport, the airline and the ground handler all pull data from, each over a different network.
Airport private 5G could carry all of it, and MSP now has a network big enough to try. MSP has not published the offer that would put its tenants on it.
Airport Private 5G at MSP Already Carries Airline Traffic
Airlines are already on MSP’s network, through the check-in carts the airport provides at its gates.
The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), which owns and operates MSP, brought the Ericsson Private 5G network into service in September 2026. Insight Enterprises resold and manages the service, and Pierson Wireless led deployment and installation, according to Computer Weekly. Insight’s case study describes 31 micro radios covering more than four square miles, with Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum carried indoors over the terminals’ existing commercial distributed antenna system (DAS), so devices roam between the terminals and the airfield.
The core supports Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G devices on the same network. Tenants need that more than the airport does, because handhelds, carts and cameras will stay on LTE for years. The MAC starts with roughly 100 devices and expects embedded subscriber identity module (eSIM) provisioning to take it past 500.
Before the build, airline agents were tied by Ethernet cables to the Common User System Equipment (CUSE) carts at the gates, the stations several airlines share for passenger processing. The carts now run over the private network. In the 2022 trial run by Communication Technology Services (CTS), an onsite packet gateway tunneled cart traffic into MSP’s existing platform, which meets the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standard. Airline payment traffic and airport traffic shared the radios without sharing a path.
The MAC has hosted shared wireless at MSP since the early days of airport Wi-Fi. Now it plans to extend private 5G to airlines, concessionaires and other partners, on terms it has not published.
Turnaround AI Needs One Network, Not Three
Three or four companies work a single turnaround, and the data each of them needs comes from the same few minutes at the stand.
SITA found the same pattern across the industry. AI works best where one operator holds the data end to end, and what holds it back at the interfaces is getting partners aligned on that data.
Camera platforms such as Assaia’s ApronAI already work this way. Gate cameras time-stamp fueling, loading and jet bridge movement, and the airport, the airline and the handler all use the output. Berlin Brandenburg Airport credits live turnaround visibility for its ground handlers with improving cooperation.
MSP’s first use case was a camera problem. Cameras on the airport tram that once relied on wired connections now run over private 5G, according to Bill Boyd, the MAC’s director of infrastructure and operations. A camera that needs no trench can go on a remote stand as easily as at a contact gate, which matters once stand-level AI extends beyond the terminal.
Camera video travels uplink, so a network planned around handhelds pulling data down will run out of capacity at the stands. The harder question is who owns what the cameras record. The video and the turnaround data that AI software extracts from it are valuable to the airport, the airline and the ground handler alike. The tenant agreement should state who owns that data and who can use it, and it should be signed before the cameras go live.
| Get the Analysis Before Your Next Airport BidSubscribe to PrivateLTEand5G for deployment intelligence on airports, transportation and critical infrastructure, written for the integrators and operators doing the work. Schedule a call |
Who Signs First, and Who Builds Their Own
The tenant an airport most wants on its network is usually the one hardest to win. The tenants it overlooks can go out and build networks of their own, on the same spectrum.
The Anchor Airline Already Has a Carrier
Delta Air Lines, including regional affiliates, held 71.55% of MSP’s passenger market share in 2025, according to the MAC. Delta is also an early customer of T-Mobile’s SuperMobile plan, which includes a nationwide 5G network slice, and RCR Wireless reported in August 2025 that the airline uses it to improve operational coordination across flight schedules and hubs. An airline that operates across a whole network of airports has good reasons to prefer one national contract to a separate arrangement at each one.
Nothing public says what Delta will do at MSP, so an integrator should go in without assuming. The airport will have to answer the same question for every airline it approaches: what does this network do that a national slice cannot? It reaches remote stands the carrier may never have engineered for, it gives a local path into the airport’s own CUSE and gate systems, and it comes with access to shared turnaround data. That answer belongs in the design work, before anyone quotes a price.
The first contracts are more likely to come from tenants without Delta’s leverage. Ground handlers and fuelers work the ramp all day, and their carrier contracts are worth asking about, because few are written with airfield coverage in mind. Concessionaires need point-of-sale connectivity inside the terminal. Sun Country, which held 11.04% of MSP’s passenger market share, is a different conversation altogether.
The choice does not have to be either-or. Ericsson’s account of the deployment describes MSP’s vehicle routers working over both the private network and public cellular. A tenant device can do the same, using the airport network where it performs better and falling back to its carrier everywhere else.
Tenant Networks Crowd the Same Spectrum
The Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) flagged a second risk in guidance first published in 2022 and updated in 2024: tenants can easily deploy their own CBRS networks, which can degrade the airport’s. ACRP also warned that some wireless contracts may give a provider exclusive management of an airport’s spectrum, even where no network exists.
Hong Kong shows that a major tenant may build its own network even where the airport plans a shared one. The Airport Authority said in 2022 it was developing private 5G for use with its airport community, and in April 2025 Hactl, which handled more than 40% of the airport’s cargo in 2024, announced its own private 5G network with HKT.
In the US, the Spectrum Access System (SAS) authorizes a tenant’s radios just as it does the airport’s, and on the General Authorized Access (GAA) tier neither network is protected from the other.
| PRO TIP: Audit the Leases Before the RFBefore you design coverage, pull the airport’s tenant leases and its DAS and Wi-Fi concession agreements. Look for wireless or spectrum exclusivity language, and check whether tenants must register radio equipment with the airport. If the leases give the airport no control over CBRS radios on its property, your tenant offer competes with tenant-built networks, and the SAS will not settle that for you. Lease amendments take longer than any radio frequency (RF) work, so start them first. |
What the Airport Can Promise, and What It Can Charge
Tenants read two clauses first: the service level and the price. Neither one is settled by the network design. Spectrum rules cap what the airport can promise, and federal grant conditions shape what it can charge.
GAA Spectrum Sets the Ceiling on the SLA
US airport networks, MSP’s indoor coverage included, typically run on CBRS, because it is the only shared spectrum an airport can use without buying a license. Under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule for the GAA tier, users “shall have no expectation of interference protection” from other GAA users. Priority Access License (PAL) holders are protected from GAA users, and the Spectrum Access System enforces that hierarchy. ACRP’s 2022 guidance, updated in 2024, advises against CBRS for critical applications where even a brief loss of signal is unacceptable.
The rules themselves may also change. Proposals to raise CBRS power levels are still unresolved at the FCC, and the OnGo Alliance restated its opposition in July 2026. Johnathan Lewis of Miami International Airport has said that losing two CBRS channels would cost the airport 29% of its network capacity. A March 2026 study by Valo Analytica, commissioned by the pro-CBRS coalition Spectrum for the Future, modeled comparable losses at airports under higher-power scenarios.
The airport can attach firm commitments and service credits to what it controls, meaning core availability, backhaul and the uptime of its own radios. Performance over GAA channels is different, and it should be reported to tenants each month rather than guaranteed. Tenants running critical applications need dual-path devices on top of that. An airport that can hold or lease PAL spectrum is in a position to promise more.
| PRO TIP: Write the SLA Around the Spectrum You HoldSplit every tenant SLA into two schedules. The first covers what the airport controls, such as core availability, backhaul and radio uptime, with service credits attached. The second covers radio conditions on the shared spectrum, reported monthly without credits. Show SAS channel changes in the tenant report. A tenant who can see why throughput dipped will renew. A tenant promised 99.99% availability on GAA spectrum will call a lawyer. |
Grant Assurances Shape the Price List
Airports that accept federal Airport Improvement Program grants agree to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grant assurances, and two of those assurances shape what it can charge tenants. Under Grant Assurance 22, an airport’s charges must be reasonable and not unjustly discriminatory, and similarly situated users have to be treated alike. Grant Assurance 25 requires airport revenue to fund the capital and operating costs of the airport or its local airport system.
Whether either assurance covers connectivity sold to tenants is a question for the airport’s counsel, and it will come up early. Does ramp connectivity count as a facility for aeronautical users? Can the anchor airline get a volume price a smaller carrier cannot? The safer structure is a published rate card with defensible classifications, priced per subscriber identity module (SIM), device class or service tier, instead of one-off deals. Tenant revenue also flows back into the airport’s cost base, which makes for a very different business case from the revenue slide in most pitch decks.
Paris Split the Network. MSP Can Choose How
How the network separates one tenant from another decides how much control each of them gets, and the three ways of doing it are not interchangeable.
The fullest tenant model on public record is in Paris. Hub One, the digital subsidiary of Groupe ADP, runs a private mobile network across Charles de Gaulle, Orly and Le Bourget on Ericsson radios. Air France has its own Ericsson core on that shared radio network, and a second core from Athonet serves other companies at the airports. When Arcep, the French telecom regulator, awarded Hub One a ten-year license in the 2.6 GHz time division duplex (TDD) band in February 2020, Groupe ADP said the network would serve more than 120,000 employees from about 1,000 companies at the three airports.
Paris is also a lesson in timing. Hub One launched on 4G, citing equipment prices and the availability of affordable devices, and its chief executive has put private 5G nearer 2030. Which of the three options fits depends on the tenant, not the network.
| Architecture | How tenants are separated | Tenant control | Device requirement | Best fit |
| Single core, per-tenant data networks | One data network name (DNN) or access point name (APN) per tenant, tunneled or segmented by virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) into its systems | Low | Any LTE or 5G device | Common-use equipment, concessions, handlers |
| Shared RAN, separate cores | Own core, SIMs and policies on the shared radio access network (RAN) | High | Tenant SIMs; multi-core RAN | An anchor airline, as Air France in Paris |
| 5G Standalone (SA) slicing | Slices with their own quality of service (QoS) on one core | Medium | 5G SA devices only | Later, once tenant fleets move to SA |
Slicing is the option that has to wait. It needs a 5G Standalone core, and it only reaches 5G devices, which rules out the LTE handhelds and carts that will make up most tenant fleets for years. Campuses built around 5G from the start can design for it sooner, as a Frankfurt industrial park did when it announced tenant slices in November 2025. Per-tenant data networks will carry most tenants at launch, and a separate core is what to offer an anchor airline that wants its own policies and SIMs. Choose per tenant class rather than once for the whole airport private 5G network.
Where Does This Leave You?
If you sell airport private 5G, treat the tenant offer as a separate product with its own discovery phase. Before pitching tenant service, map which major tenants hold national carrier contracts and what they cover on the airfield. Bring the airport a tiered SLA that matches the spectrum it holds, an isolation option for each tenant class, a rate card structure the airport’s counsel can review. Price the lease audit as paid discovery, since the airport needs it whether or not a tenant signs. An integrator who has done this once at a real airport knows things the rest of the market does not, and that is worth publishing. The Executive Voice Program exists for exactly that, and Partner With Us puts the same expertise in front of airport buyers. Expect the first tenant contract to take longer than the build.
If you run information technology (IT) or operations at an airport, decide how tenants will be classified and who owns their data before anyone quotes a price, and find out which radios your tenants have already switched on. If you run ramp or station technology for an airline or ground handler, take both networks to the gates where your coverage is worst, test them against each other before you decide, and ask what access you would get to shared turnaround data. In either role, the first step is knowing where your current wireless already falls short, which is what the wireless self-audit is for. The harder work comes after that, when the results have to become a tenant offer, a coverage plan or a choice between two networks. PrivateLTEand5G’s advisory team helps enterprises with that stage, drawing on the same deployment research behind this article. None of this is fast, and the airports that sign tenants will be the ones that sorted out the paperwork before the radios went up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can an airport private 5G network charge airlines for connectivity?
Airports routinely charge tenants for services, and connectivity can be one of them. Federally funded airports must keep charges to aeronautical users such as airlines reasonable and not unjustly discriminatory, and the revenue has to go back into the airport. A published rate card with defensible classifications holds up better than one-off deals with individual airlines. The airport’s counsel should sign off on that structure before any tenant sees a price.
Why would an airline use the airport’s network instead of its national carrier?
The case is strongest where the carrier underperforms, on remote stands, in baggage areas and across other airfield locations that public networks cover poorly. The airport network also offers a local path into airport systems without traffic leaving the property, plus access to shared turnaround data. None of that outweighs the simplicity of one national contract for an airline running hundreds of stations, which is why dual-path devices that use both networks are usually the realistic answer.
Is CBRS reliable enough for tenant SLAs, or does the airport need licensed spectrum?
CBRS performs well for operational traffic, and it is the default choice for US airports because it needs no spectrum purchase. The limit shows up in the contract rather than the coverage map. GAA users have no protection from each other, so an airport cannot guarantee radio performance it does not control. An airport that can hold or lease PAL spectrum is in a better position, which is the same advantage Paris gets from its licensed French allocation. Any multi-year SLA on CBRS should also leave the airport room to adjust if the FCC changes the power rules.
Does network slicing solve tenant isolation today?
Not for most tenant devices yet, because slicing needs a 5G Standalone core and Standalone devices, and tenant fleets are still largely LTE. The practical answer is to build the isolation a tenant contract actually requires, using separate data networks and quality-of-service policies, then write the agreement so the tenant can move onto a slice later without renegotiating. An airport that waits for slicing before selling tenant service will wait several years.
