Quick Answer: Industrial private 5G makes sense where standard wireless keeps failing, and it fails in a different way at each kind of site. On a plant floor, control traffic has to arrive on time through radio noise. In a warehouse, scanners and robots can lose their connection as they move between access points. Port cranes under remote control stream video to an operator, and nearly all of that traffic flows up. Wi-Fi still handles plenty of fixed, indoor work, so many sites run both. Getting a working pilot approved for rollout often takes longer than the network build. At the October 20 Making Industrial Connectivity Work bootcamp, operators and integrators explain what they built and what went wrong.
Unplanned downtime costs the world’s 500 biggest companies almost $1.4 trillion a year, or 11% of their revenues, according to Siemens’ True Cost of Downtime 2024 report. The report doesn’t say how much of that begins with a dropped connection. In one airport cargo operation, the trouble came down to handheld scanners.
At Lufthansa Cargo’s warehouse at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), workers on foot and on forklifts track freight with handheld Zebra scanners across 100,000 square feet of warehouse and the apron outside. The old Wi-Fi network needed 17 access points. Scanners often lost their connection as they roamed between them, and even a one-second drop meant logging in again by hand.
Mario Schwarz, Operations Manager at Lufthansa Cargo, is one of the speakers at Making Industrial Connectivity Work, our 65-minute virtual bootcamp on October 20 at 11:00 AM ET. Operators and integrators from manufacturing, warehouses and ports will cover what private 5G solved on their sites, what it didn’t, and how they got projects through internal approval. Register for the bootcamp and bring your questions to the open Q&A.
Same Pressure, Three Different Ways to Break a Network
The bootcamp groups manufacturing, warehouses and ports because they face the same pressure: more connected machines and less tolerance for stoppages. They differ in how standard wireless fails on their sites, and that difference should drive the design.
The Plant Floor: Noise and Timing
Motors, drives and steel structures make a plant floor a hostile radio environment, and for control traffic, the worst delay in a shift matters more than the average. Wi-Fi devices contend for airtime on unlicensed spectrum, so a busy access point can’t promise when a packet will go out. A private cellular network schedules who transmits and when, on a spectrum that isn’t open to every device in range.
CIMPOR runs private 5G networks at three Portuguese cement plants. They carry IoT sensors for predictive maintenance, which CIMPOR’s internal projections say could save up to $1 million a year per plant by reducing unplanned equipment downtime. An AI model can only flag a failing bearing from the readings that reach it.
The Warehouse: Motion
In a warehouse, scanners, forklifts and mobile robots pass from one access point’s coverage to the next many times in a shift, and every handoff is a chance to lose the connection.
Lufthansa Cargo tested Ericsson Private 5G on Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum for nearly a year, then replaced its Wi-Fi. Two radios now cover the space that needed 17 access points, which ended the constant roaming, and a scanner that does disconnect recovers without a manual login. Schwarz puts the gain in process speed at 70 to 80%. The uses it has planned next, including autonomous guided vehicles and AI-powered anomaly detection, would add more moving, data-heavy devices to the same network.
The Port Yard: Distance and Uplink
A container yard covers acres, and cranes run from a control room send video back to their operators. In a field validation published in May 2026, Konecranes found that about 95% of the payload in remote crane operation travels from the crane to the operator. The study covered large gantry cranes in yards where radios typically sit above stack height. There, the steel boxes mattered less than uplink capacity, which set how many remote sessions a cell could carry. Handhelds and trucks at ground level between the stacks raise a separate coverage question.
A yard network planned around devices that mostly receive work orders ends up sized in the wrong direction once cranes go remote.
Where Private 5G Earns Its Place, and Where Wi-Fi Keeps Its Job
Private 5G pays off in three situations:
• Devices move across large areas. Handovers between cells are built into the cellular standard. Konecranes, which has used Wi-Fi-based systems in earlier crane projects, considers traditional Wi-Fi generally unsuitable for remote crane operation because its handovers can take several hundred milliseconds.
• Coverage has to stretch. A cellular radio can cover far more ground than a Wi-Fi access point, so a large yard or warehouse needs fewer radios.
• Uplink carries the load. A cellular network can give more airtime to uplink where spectrum rules and neighboring networks allow, which suits sites where cameras and cranes send most of the data.
Wi-Fi keeps its job in offices, at fixed workstations, in lower-density indoor areas and anywhere the installed base already works. Konecranes calls it suitable for many industrial applications and says existing wireless can run alongside private 5G during a transition. For many industrial sites, the realistic design is both networks, with a clear rule for which devices go where.
| PRO TIP: Test With the Machines, Not a LaptopRun the acceptance walk with the actual mobile assets at operating speed and full load: the forklift with its scanner, the robot on its route, the crane with every camera streaming. Log handover interruptions and uplink throughput alongside signal strength. A survey laptop on a cart measures coverage, and it won’t catch what happens when a loaded forklift crosses a coverage edge at full speed. |
| See what worked, and what didn’t, on October 20Making Industrial Connectivity Work is a 65-minute virtual bootcamp starting at 11:00 AM ET, with Lufthansa Cargo’s Mario Schwarz among the speakers. Operators and integrators explain how they vetted solutions and won internal approval, and the session ends with an open Q&A.Save your spot |
From Pilot to Payoff Runs Through Approvals
Getting the radios to work is rarely the slowest part. Pilots tend to stall at one site when IT owns the network and operational technology (OT) teams own the machines, but nobody owns the rollout to the next site.
Lufthansa Cargo’s path from pilot to full deployment at LAX went like this:
• Its IT consulting subsidiary, Lufthansa Industry Solutions, compared Wi-Fi, public cellular, and private cellular before choosing.
• Full deployment came only after the proof of concept met the company’s uptime and reliability requirements for day-to-day operations.
• Schwarz has said time is the number that matters most to Lufthansa Cargo, and that is how he reports the result.
• Workers who had come to trust paper more than their scanners gave up the paper logs within days.
CIMPOR shows what comes after the first site. Experience from its first plant shortened the rollouts at the next two and gave it a template for plants in other regions.
The October 20 panel, “from pilot to payoff,” covers how operators and integrators vetted solutions, what went wrong, and how they won internal approval. I’m hosting, and Mario Schwarz will speak for Lufthansa Cargo.
| PRO TIP: Agree on the Payoff Metric Before the Pilot StartsAt the scoping stage, ask operations which number they already report every week and want to move, such as minutes lost to scanner logins, crane cycle time or a downtime category on the maintenance report. Write that figure into the pilot’s success criteria with a baseline and a target. Network metrics still matter, but the approval meeting will turn on the operations number. |
Where Does This Leave You?
If you’re a systems integrator or vendor, start scoping industrial work from how standard wireless fails on the site. A warehouse proposal should lead with handover behavior for the devices that move, a yard proposal with an uplink model per remote crane session, and a plant proposal with worst-case latency and the sensor count the customer’s AI roadmap assumes. If you have field data from a deployment on any of these, the Executive Voice Program and Partner With Us put the story in front of the operators and IT teams who read this platform.
If you run IT or OT at a plant, warehouse, or terminal, write down your site’s failure mode before the first vendor call: which devices move, how far, how much data they send up, and what stops when a link drops for one second. The 10-question wireless self-audit scores where your current network falls short, and it’s built to be done before any vendor conversation. Expect the approval work to take longer than the radio work. To hear how others got through it, register for October 20 and bring your hardest question to the open Q&A.
FAQ
Hasn’t Wi-Fi 7 closed the gap for warehouses?
Wi-Fi 7 adds capacity, and its multi-link operation lets a device hold links on several bands of the same access point. Moving to the next access point is still a handover, and a large warehouse has a lot of access-point boundaries. For devices that move all shift, the number of boundaries matters more than peak speed.
Do we need licensed spectrum to run private 5G?
In the US, CBRS lets a site start on shared spectrum without buying a license. Germany issues local licenses in 3.7 to 3.8 GHz, and the EU requires member states to make 3.8 to 4.2 GHz available for local networks. Licensing costs differ by country, so price the spectrum before fixing the pilot design.
Is private 5G worth it for a single plant that’s already wired?
Sometimes it isn’t. If most equipment sits on fixed cabling and few devices move, a better Wi-Fi design may cost less and solve the real problem. The case gets stronger with mobile assets, outdoor areas, or a sensor and AI roadmap that will multiply the connected devices over the next few years.
Who should own the network, IT or OT?
Write the split down before the pilot. IT tends to run the core and SIM management. OT should decide which devices get priority, when maintenance happens and what counts as an outage, because OT carries the cost when a machine stops. A disagreement that seems minor at one site gets harder to settle once five sites depend on the answer.
