As of April 2022, China has built more than 1.5 million 5G base stations. There are 2400 "5G+ industrial Internet" projects, 30.72 million sets of industrial equipment connections and 225,000 industrial APPs across the country. After long-term exploration and accumulation, 5G has played an increasingly important role in industrial applications, providing a strong support for digital transformation of various industries.
ZTE, a global leader in 5G, has been actively exploring private network implementation combined with industry applications since the global commercial deployment of 5G networks. To verify the availability of 5G network to the industry, the early industry practice used the same hardware and technology as those in the ToC network, which was the era of private network 1.0. However, general-purpose 5G products and hardware cannot meet the requirements of enterprise users for deployment conditions, reliability, and overall cost. As a result, 5G private networks have entered the 2.0 era, that is, the era of customized private networks.
In the private network 2.0 era, the growth of 5G networks has the following features.

Enhanced Adaptability to Network Scenarios 
By cooperating with industry-leading enterprises, ZTE has developed scenario-based solutions to achieve rapid 5G promotion, covering more than 10 industries such as power, coal mines, manufacturing, ports, iron and steel, petrochemical, rail transit, supermarkets, hospitals, and campuses.
On the wireless side, ZTE has developed hardware devices such as high-frequency devices and intrinsically safe explosion-proof devices, innovatively proposed Qcell chain networking and pBridge-free direct connection, and provided simplified edge computing NodeEngine, edge video gateways, and nomadic base stations.
On the core network side, ZTE provides a full range of lightweight 5G private core network products, including general iCube, compact iCube and single model i5GC. In the simplest scenario, a 2U server can be deployed with a 5G core network to provide a simplified 5G network with minimal space and energy consumption.
In terms of network operation and maintenance (O&M), ZTE's ToBeEasy solution provides one-stop integrated cloud-network O&M. The five-in-one network management helps to achieve efficient end-to-end cloud-network delivery, that is plug-and-play deployment in a lightweight manner, so that industry applications can be easily viewed and managed. The enterprise users can operate and maintain wireless networks as they do with optical modems.
For private wireless network planning, ZTE has developed 5G private network solutions for specific scenarios in vertical industries, involving network requirements, planning, design, construction, maintenance and optimization. Their typical services include video backhaul, remote control, machine vision, cloud PLC and AGV, and are applied to electric power, mining, port, iron and steel, manufacturing, rail transit, supermarket, and chemical industry. Through joint practice with industry leaders, ZTE has accumulated experience and copied it to other enterprises to promote 5G applications and provide guidance for the replication and promotion of subsequent private solutions.

Enhanced Network Access Capability
ZTE's private network 2.0 solution adds industry IMS (iIMS) capability on the basis of i5GC. With cloud-network cabinets as the carriers, the solution provides "data + voice" dual-engine private network. ZTE replicates and applies its experience in large-scale commercial use of VoNR in the ToC field to the ToB field, helping enterprise users achieve high-definition voice and video calls in the mining area. In this way, the underground 5G network is fully covered with data voice. In addition, ZTE can interconnect with third-party voice dispatching manufacturers to integrate 5G networks into private mine networks and accelerate the intelligent upgrade of mines.
By moving the lightweight i5GC and iIMS network to the exclusive campus (mining area), enterprise users can make voice calls using various types of terminals, including fixed and mobile terminals, and enjoy private network voice services such as internal short number interconnection, automatic or manual station services, and secondary traffic distribution. At the same time, the lightweight private iIMS can be connected to an operator's large IMS for interoperability between the private network number and the external large network number.
To address the pain point that enterprise users use a large number of commercial voice-centric terminals and are unable to access the network without IMS deployment, ZTE has launched an innovative AnyDevice solution in its 5G private network 2.0. The solution provides embedded proxy components, enhanced access engine and optimized authentication logic in i5GC, so that enterprise users can use any commercial terminal to access intranet ToB industry data, achieving zero perception access, zero hardware addition, and zero terminal restrictions. This greatly enhances application scenarios of the private network. 
In the ToB scenario, the volume of uplink data traffic is much larger than that of downlink data traffic. ZTE has proposed an 1D3U interference coordination scheme, which allows users to flexibly configure the ratio of online time slots to offline timeslots to provide more uplink access capabilities. SuperMIMO can greatly improve the uplink capacity of multiple users in a unified area, and the total throughput can be increased by up to four times.
Enterprise users are more and more widely distributed, and they have the need for network connection whether in the far sea or at low altitude. ZTE's tailor-made ultra-far coverage products can cover up to 100 kilometers of the sea surface, providing network guarantee for fishing boats and aquaculture, and its 1+X coverage solution can offer three-dimensional coverage of the airspace below 300 meters, which provides the possibility for the promotion and application of dones.

Enhanced Network Determinacy
As 5G gradually penetrates into their core-layer services, industrial enterprises have increasingly high requirements for deterministic 5G networks. An ultra-low latency and ultra-reliable deterministic 5G private network will continuously empower core industrial processes and improve production efficiency.
Time sensitive networking (TSN) and ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) are key technologies of 5G empowering industrial control. ZTE has released the time promised communication (TPC) solution in its private network 2.0, which can provide a series of new capabilities and features based on 5G TSN, 5G LAN, URLLC and SLA precision control defined by 3GPP Release 16, as well as a new architecture for super wireless core network convergence. Through the end-to-end architecture innovation and scheduling optimization of the 5G system, the solution provides a deterministic and promised delay jitter to fundamentally guarantee precise industrial control for enterprises.
To meet the differentiated high reliability needs of the industry, ZTE takes the lead in grading network reliability in its private network 2.0 and provides a four-level high reliability mechanism.
—Level-1 reliability: Through the self-healing, regeneration, and migration mechanisms, local devices can be rapidly recovered when a fault occurs. This is applicable to scenarios where there is no high requirement for service interruption.
—Level-2 reliability: 1+1 hardware redundancy is adopted without a single point of failure. Servers, switches and firewalls are backed up with dual networks, dual planes and dual physical ports. This is applicable to most commercial private networks.
—Level-3 reliability: 1+1 hot standby and session-level synchronization are provided. When a fault occurs, the terminal will not be dropped and the service will not be interrupted.
—Level-4 reliability: 3GPP R16 URLLC end-to-end dual-PDU session redundancy, and frame replication and elimination for reliability (FRER) are provided. This is applicable to industry application scenarios that have high reliability requirements for end-to-end 5G systems.

Conclusion
With the deepening of the 5G-enabled industry, 5G ToB private network has entered a new stage, and the industry urgently needs a new network to meet its characteristics. 5G evolves from the public network 1.0 that provides basic connectivity to the new private network 2.0 era that provides scenario adaptability, enhanced network access capability, ultra-high bandwidth, wider coverage, enhanced network determinism, deterministic delay jitter, ultra-high reliability, and simplified local operation and maintenance.
ZTE is not only an important supplier of 5G network equipment, but also an active network service provider in the industrial digital transformation. It aims to provide the best private network and help the industry with full digital and intelligent transformation. In the face of diverse needs of thousands of industries, ZTE tries its best to offer customized and simplified solutions to accurately empower the industries.