Slovakia’s first 5G private network

2023–2024 · Network · Slovak Telekom · 5G · Private network · Industrial IoT

Context

Slovak enterprises with industrial sites — manufacturing, logistics, R&D campuses — have long dealt with a coverage problem: the buildings, machinery, and shielding made public mobile networks unreliable, and Wi-Fi alone couldn’t carry the latency, density, and reliability profile that Industry 4.0 use cases demand. By 2022, the underlying 5G standalone (SA) technology was mature enough to address this, but no Slovak operator had deployed a private 5G SA network for an enterprise customer. The market was waiting for a credible reference.

Challenge

Build the first private 5G SA network in Slovakia, end-to-end: spectrum, hardware, on-site integration, security model, and a commercial framework that an enterprise customer would actually buy. Do it as a real production deployment — not a lab demo — at a site whose use cases would resonate with the broader industrial market.

What I did

I led the Slovak Telekom B2B product team responsible for taking private 5G from concept to a deployable enterprise offering. That work spanned: shaping the product proposition and pricing for industrial customers, coordinating with our network and IT teams on the SA core deployment, selecting the right launch partners — first the Technical University of Košice for the public technology launch, then Asseco CEIT in Žilina for the first industrial production deployment — and building the cross-functional way of working that let a network-operator org ship a B2B-product-shaped offering on a customer-led timeline.

The launch at TUKE in June 2023 made it the first private 5G SA network in operation in Slovakia. The Asseco CEIT deployment that followed proved the model in a real industrial setting and gave us the reference architecture we needed to scale to other enterprise customers.

In the press

• Slovakia’s first private 5G SA network already in operation — Technical University of Košice

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