Delivering private 5G services to enterprises brings new revenue opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs), but it also introduces a complex set of challenges. From managing multi-vendor environments to ensuring performance for mission-critical workloads, CSPs are under pressure to meet strict SLAs and maintain operational efficiency. Anil Kolipara, Head of the Testing Automation Portfolio at Spartan Communications (now part of Keysight Technologies), shared practical insights into how Spirent helps CSPs address these issues through advanced testing, automation, and assurance frameworks.
Understanding Enterprise 5G Needs and CSP Testing Challenges
The enterprise segment for 5G is vastly different from the consumer market. It includes industries like manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and energy — all with unique technical needs and business goals.
Unlike consumer 5G, private enterprise deployments require customized service architectures, often built on disaggregated and cloud-native environments. This results in more complex supply chains, involving multiple hardware and software vendors.
Kolipara highlights three key challenges CSPs face in delivering enterprise-grade 5G:
- Competitiveness: Differentiating offerings in a crowded market
- Performance and Assurance: Meeting SLA expectations consistently
- Operational Efficiency: Reducing cost while ensuring performance and reliability
How Spirent and Telefónica Built a CI/CD/CT Platform for SLA-Driven 5G
To manage these challenges, Telefónica partnered with Spirent to implement a full CI/CD/CT (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing) pipeline. This solution integrates Spirent’s test library via a robust API framework.
Here’s how the platform benefits Telefónica:
- Automated SLA Verification: Tests are embedded into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure tiered SLAs (Silver, Gold, Platinum) are met continuously.
- Proactive Fault Management: Early issue detection before deployment minimizes risks to enterprise operations.
- Resilience at Scale: With ongoing changes in the network, automated testing ensures consistent quality and performance.
This collaboration now serves as a reference model for other CSPs looking to deploy automated assurance in their private 5G strategy.
Private 5G Requires Business-Critical Assurance
Enterprise-grade private 5G networks demand far stricter testing than public networks. In many use cases, such as industrial automation or smart manufacturing, even a few milliseconds of latency can disrupt critical operations.
Failures in private 5G networks are not just performance issues — they become business continuity risks. Unlike consumer networks where individual users are affected, enterprise disruptions can halt production, impact safety systems, or damage brand trust.
Spirent helps CSPs manage this level of responsibility through:
- Automated SLA Compliance Checks: Ongoing validation that services meet latency, throughput, and reliability benchmarks.
- Real-World Testing Scenarios: Simulating live environments to test resilience against outages or network degradation.
- Performance Analytics: Providing insights that allow CSPs to fine-tune services before issues impact operations.
Flexible Testing for AI, IoT, and Automation Use Cases
Enterprises are increasingly adopting AI, IoT, and automation across verticals. These applications introduce dynamic workloads and evolving SLA requirements.
CSPs must adapt quickly to these changes without compromising service quality. Kolipara explains that maintaining performance consistency requires a vendor-agnostic testing and automation framework. This ensures:
- Interoperability Across Vendors: CSPs can test any new vendor’s hardware or software without redesigning the entire validation infrastructure.
- Adaptability to API and Service Changes: Even as APIs evolve or components change, the core testing framework remains consistent.
- Scalability for Future Technologies: As enterprises demand support for edge AI, connected devices, or new workloads, CSPs can scale with confidence.
This approach is especially vital in industries like healthcare, where reliability directly affects patient safety, or transportation, where low-latency control is mission-critical.
Simplifying Multi-Vendor Integration Across RAN, Core, and Edge
Managing multi-vendor environments across RAN, core, and edge adds complexity to any private 5G deployment. Spirent supports CSPs with a three-pronged strategy:
- Expanding Testing Scope
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- Traditional 3GPP testing focuses on functional compliance. Spirent extends this to include non-functional testing — such as performance under stress, reliability during impairments, and overall system resiliency.
- For example, how does a core network component behave under partial outage conditions? Spirent’s testing simulates these conditions to ensure real-world readiness.
- Evolving Test Methodologies
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- Spirent enables wraparound testing, isolating individual components to validate compliance, followed by adjacent and end-to-end testing.
- This phased approach helps identify integration issues early in the lifecycle, reducing deployment delays and service disruptions.
- Embedding Continuous Automation
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- Spirent helps CSPs integrate testing into their automation pipelines. Each network update — whether it’s a new vendor, a configuration change, or a security patch — is automatically tested for performance and compliance.
By embedding testing into the network lifecycle, CSPs achieve a consistent and reliable integration path across all components and environments.
Building a Scalable and Automated 5G Testing Strategy
Spirent’s work with CSPs like Telefónica demonstrates the importance of automation, third-party validation, and vendor-agnostic frameworks in delivering private 5G services. Whether CSPs are supporting industrial IoT, AR/VR applications, or AI-driven workloads, the ability to test, monitor, and assure performance in real time is non-negotiable.
As private 5G continues to scale, automated and flexible testing platforms like Spirent’s will be critical in helping CSPs maintain competitiveness, meet strict SLAs, and deliver value to enterprises across industries.
