Ericsson taps Chile’s Entel as 5G ‘reseller’ for private networks

Ericsson is looking at telcos to expand the network of resellers and integrators of its 5G radio gear for enterprise and industrial applications in Latin America, including operators such as Chile’s Entel, Rodrigo Dienstmann, CEO of Ericsson for the Southern Cone, told BNamericas.

Under an agreement signed with Entel, the Chilean group will integrate Ericsson’s private 5G standalone solution within its offering. In other words, Entel will be a distributor, reseller and integrator of Ericsson’s 5G equipment for enterprises. 

Ericsson is a vendor of equipment for Entel’s commercial 5G networks in Chile. Both have worked together to deploy the technology across the country and last month Entel became the first Chilean operator to deliver 100% of the first stage of its new 5G network nationwide.

At the same time, Entel and Chile have carried out a dozen pilots of B2B applications.

These pilots cover a range of industries, including health (the first remote ultrasound), smart factories (remote-controlled robotics), agriculture and forestry (drones with advanced analytics for real-time monitoring and information on the status of crops) and transport management, Ericsson said.

“Entel Corp segment customers will benefit from the use of high-speed mobile networks, as well as the ability to connect thousands of devices to function optimally, with guaranteed quality of service, minimum delays, security and data reliability,” Ericsson said in a statement.

In Brazil, América Móvil’s Embratel/Claro is another example of a telco working as a distributor and integrator for Ericsson in the private sector, said Dienstmann, who spoke to BNamericas on the sidelines of the Futurecom conference in São Paulo.

It was the two América Móvil group companies that basically brought Ericsson equipment into the private network developed at a Nestlé factory.

Ericsson, Claro and Embratel were also responsible for the project to deploy a 5G SA private network at WEG’s factory in Santa Catarina.

“We're starting to expand this ecosystem for B2B [in the region]. And we're looking at telcos as well as non-telcos to be these integrators,” said Dienstmann.

“We're getting organized, we recently created an enterprise area in Brazil.”

5G SA

5G SA networks are well-suited to complex industrial environments, with low latency and high capacity for simultaneous connections such as mining, logistics and transportation, according to Ericsson.

Ericsson said that its 5G SA networks are already being used on a global scale by different industries, ranging from the mining and ports sectors to auto manufacturing and agriculture.

In Latin America, however, the company’s focus has so far been mostly manufacturing, through public cases such as WEG and Nestlé, in addition to the pilots with Entel in Chile and in other markets.

Dienstmann said that Ericsson is a “global leader” in private networks, an epithet also claimed by rival Nokia, which claims that it has an 80% share of the market of private networks for mining.

The executive said that in around three months Ericsson should be announcing new cases of private networks in Latin America in the areas of mining, logistics and ports.