Anand Shah, director of technology and architecture for Verizon, joins the podcast to share insight into industry progress for deploying network slicing, private networks and Open RAN.

"[Open RAN] increases your competition and definitely decreases costs for us, so we're all in there whenever we can save some on costs," says Shah. "The more vendors you include in any formula and the more equipment you include, the harder that equation gets to solve. And it's not that we can't solve it, we can solve it."

In addition to the challenge of coordinating with multiple vendors and technologies for Open RAN, Shah explains how service providers have to consider enterprise customers' needs for network slicing and private networks. He also addresses the debate around whether an enterprise using a private network also needs network slicing.

While AR, VR and robotics applications generate the most buzz, Shah says many of those private network use cases are several years out. Currently, computer vision is one of the most widely used private network use cases, he explains.

"Right now, it's pretty simple. One of the biggest use cases is getting their computer vision or camera uplink feeds into a local MEC or a cloud compute – wherever it is, on-prem or off-prem, etc. Computer vision seems to be a big use case," says Shah.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading