Two pieces of reporting from August 2026, read together, describe a gap that utility private network buyers need to take seriously. One documents the trend: utilities are scaling private LTE, 5G, and industrial IoT deployments across operational technology environments, and that expansion is drawing proportionate attention from attackers targeting the links between OT systems. The other documents a specific deployment — Ericsson, OneLayer, and Burns & McDonnell building a private LTE network for Tampa Electric in the United States — that shows what addressing that gap actually looks like in an active build, rather than in a vendor security whitepaper.
Why Utility Private Network Expansion Increases the Attack Surface
The core dynamic is straightforward and not specific to utilities: every private network deployment that connects previously air-gapped or minimally networked operational technology creates a new attack surface that didn’t exist before. What makes utilities a particularly exposed case is the nature of what sits behind that network — grid control systems, substation automation, and increasingly, distributed energy resource management — where a security failure doesn’t just risk data loss but risks physical infrastructure and service continuity for the customers downstream of it. Reporting from FierceWireless this month framed this plainly: as utilities embrace private networks to modernise OT connectivity, attackers are embracing the same private networks as a new avenue into systems that were previously harder to reach.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre added a specific technical recommendation to this picture in a blog published the same week, emphasising identity-based access controls and infrastructure diversification as the two priorities for reducing both the cost and the complexity of securing private 5G deployments. The pairing of those two recommendations is worth noting: identity-based access — verifying and authorising every device and user individually, rather than trusting anything inside the network perimeter — addresses the security gap directly, while infrastructure diversification, avoiding a single-vendor, single-architecture dependency, addresses the cost and complexity side, on the logic that a more open, multi-vendor approach to private 5G infrastructure makes it easier and cheaper to apply consistent security controls across the estate rather than being locked into whatever security model one vendor’s stack supports natively.
What the Tampa Electric Deployment Shows About Applying This in Practice
Tampa Electric’s private LTE build is a useful real-world reference precisely because it pairs three distinct roles rather than treating the deployment as a single vendor’s problem to solve end to end. Ericsson supplies the private wireless infrastructure itself. OneLayer supplies security capability specifically layered onto that infrastructure — OneLayer‘s positioning in the private network market has consistently been around visibility and access control for OT devices on private cellular networks, which lines up directly with the identity-based access priority the NCSC flagged. Burns & McDonnell, an engineering and integration firm with a long history in utility infrastructure, handles the engineering and integration work connecting the private network build to the utility’s existing OT environment.
That three-way split matters because it reflects an honest allocation of expertise rather than one vendor claiming end-to-end capability it may not actually have in depth. A connectivity vendor is not necessarily an OT security specialist, and an OT security specialist is not necessarily positioned to handle the physical and civil engineering integration work a utility deployment requires. Utilities evaluating similar builds have a live reference point here for what a properly resourced private network security architecture actually requires in terms of partner composition — not a single RFP line item, but connectivity, security, and integration treated as three separate specialisms brought together deliberately, each contributing its own deep expertise to the layer it owns.
The Gap This Deployment Is the Exception To
The broader trend documented by FierceWireless is the more important half of this story for utility buyers evaluating their own roadmap: private network expansion in the utility sector is outpacing the security architecture applied to it in the general case, with Tampa Electric’s layered approach reading as a considered exception rather than the emerging norm. Much of the private network deployment activity documented across utilities this year has focused on coverage, capacity, and connecting previously unconnected assets — legitimate and valuable goals in their own right — without the same level of public detail about identity-based access controls or a named security specialist brought in alongside the connectivity vendor.
For a utility building a business case for private LTE or 5G, the practical takeaway isn’t that private networks are unsafe — it’s that the security architecture needs to be treated as a first-class design decision with named ownership across connectivity, identity and access, and integration from the outset, rather than an add-on evaluated after the connectivity vendor is already selected and the network design is already largely fixed. Retrofitting identity-based access control onto a private network built without it in mind is considerably harder, and more expensive, than designing it in from the start alongside the connectivity procurement itself.
What to Look for in an Identity-Based Access Model Before Signing
The NCSC’s identity-based access recommendation is straightforward to state and considerably harder to verify in a vendor evaluation without knowing what to ask. A genuinely identity-based model authenticates and authorises every individual device and user against a defined policy before granting network access, continuously reassesses that access rather than granting it once at connection time, and logs access decisions in enough detail to support an audit after an incident. Utilities evaluating vendors on this front should ask for specifics rather than accepting a general assurance: whether device identity is verified through a hardware-rooted credential or a more easily spoofed software-only method, whether access policy is enforced centrally and consistently across every connected OT system or varies by integration, and whether the access logging is detailed enough to reconstruct exactly which device accessed which system and when, in the event of a suspected breach. A private network build that can answer all three specifically, the way the Ericsson, OneLayer, and Burns & McDonnell partnership structure suggests Tampa Electric’s build is positioned to, gives a utility a genuinely strong security foundation to build its own private network business case around.
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