For utilities, it’s no longer a question of if they digitise, it’s about when and how. But, in a world that’s evolving faster than ever, the sector needs connectivity that can grow alongside it.
In a time where skilled personnel are in short supply, technology and digitisation are essential to meeting these expectations – but these solutions only work as well as your connectivity does.
According to Ericsson Senior Engineer Consultant, Jodie Favolo, most utilities already see the value that 5G connectivity and digitisation will have for reliability and operational efficiency – but for many the barriers to adoption were too high.
So, Ericsson is determined to tear them down.
Going the distance
As technology evolves, utilities have an increasing need for faster speeds and lower latency to enable real‑time monitoring and support emerging AI applications.
But with all this clever innovation it’s easy to forget the most important thing that telecommunication networks do – they let people communicate.
If you couldn’t talk to your team at all, would you be able to do your job?
Ms Favolo, said that this is the reality for many field technicians that travel to remote sites.
“When you’ve got workers out in regional areas they [often] have to drive back into a town make the call to [update] head office on a job, get [permission or parts] then drive back out to the job site, complete the job, and then drive back into town again to let [head office] know that the job has been completed,” she said.
Sometimes, these workers can be travelling hundreds of kilometres in a day – which means they’re often spending more time behind the wheel than in the field.
Advancements in 5G cellular and satellite connectivity offer a promising way forward, but Ms Favolo explained that every utility needs a tailored approach.
“It’s not just [about making] sure that whatever we deliver is what [utilities] need today, they need to make sure that [there is room] for the solution to expand, change and incorporate [tomorrow’s] technologies,” she said.
Weighing the costs
Ericsson is the technology behind most of Australia’s cellular networks. The company built our first public telephone system in 1959, and it deployed our first 2G and 3G networks.
It partnered with Telstra to bring 4G to Australia, and in 2019 the two companies teamed up once again to launch our 5G network.
For more than 130 years, the company has been shaping how Australia, and the world, communicates – and it does that by listening to people and industry voices, and then responding to their needs.
The company’s 2025 State of Enterprise Connectivity survey found that more than 47 per cent of respondents from the manufacturing and utility sectors lack the skills and personnel required to deploy and manage their network – and nearly 39 per cent said that navigating the complexity of a network upgrade was a major hurdle for their organisation.
Cyber security is also a major concern for the sector, particularly when it comes to critical infrastructure, and Ms Favolo said utilities often ask her for solutions that enable their critical assets to reap the benefits of digitisation without compromising their integrity.
Another key challenge, particularly for utilities that operate in regional or remote areas, is finding a reliable connectivity solution where cellular coverage is patchy.
For those organisations, more than 46 per cent said they don’t use satellite because it’s too expensive, and the perception that it will not work with their existing connectivity solutions was also cited as a key inhibitor.
In fact, the main barrier for more than 50 per cent of utilities was shown be the perceived cost of deployment and maintenance of 5G wireless network connectivity.
However, Ms Favolo said that almost half of the respondents also reported that unreliable connectivity led to operational inefficiencies and increased operational costs – and about one-third also reported an increase in waste and reputational damage or loss of earnings as a consequence of poor connectivity.
It almost seems like a rock and a hard place, but Ms Favolo said the solution is in the way that you upgrade – and what you upgrade to.
Getting it right
All internet connections are either wired or wireless.
Wired connections physically connect a site to the internet with some kind of hardware, such as fibre optic.
These networks offer a high level of security, however, they also require extensive planning, take a month or three or deploy and are typically less adaptable to change and evolving technology. Because they’re inherently tied to a physical location the distance they can span is also limited and IoT devices on this type of network need to be connected via cables.
On the other side, utilities typically have the option of a fixed wireless network, which connects to a specific location via a receiver that can’t be moved, or a mobile connection such as satellite or cellular.
Mobile networks are inherently more flexible and faster to deploy – as they can change locations without interrupting service. This means they can be used in remote locations, deployed in vehicles and can connect IoT devices across vast geographical areas.
So, what should utilities use? According to Ms Favolo, the answer is often all of the above – but cellular is the key component that links everything together.
Next generation
The rollout of 5G brought higher speeds, low latency and massive device connectivity. But 5G is not just a performance upgrade, it’s poised to reshape the digital landscape like never before.
Where previous generations were focused primarily on broad consumer needs, 5G is designed to serve diverse sectors, including time-critical applications and large‑scale IoT networks.
“Utilities need a solution that covers a variety of connection options,” Ms Favolo said.
“Every iteration of cellular provides bigger bandwidth and greater reliability, but each generation also shortens the radio frequency length,”
“3G had smaller bandwidth, and it worked really well for IoT applications and it supported voice calls. It wasn’t great for data – but it travelled a long way.
“4G provided that access to data, but the radio frequency lengths got shorter, and then 5G gets shorter again.
“So, we get high bandwidth and high performance from 5G – but we need more cell sites to provide that cellular coverage.”
Very remote areas typically don’t have access to that cellular coverage, so Ms Favolo explained that utilities that operate in those areas would then connect to satellite.
From Ericsson’s perspective, Ms Favolo said the company specialises in routers that are designed to provide stability and reliability on the cellular network as well as fixed networks and satellite networks.
“In the utility sector, a lot of workers are out in remote areas with harsh [climates], so a lot of our devices are ruggedised and designed to withstand those environments,” she said.
“We want to provide a reliable and stable connection for those workers, so we also need to make sure that the tech inside our routers support connectivity to all those different types of networks.
“For example, when our Cradlepoint routers are installed in a vehicle and that user goes from a metropolitan area with cellular coverage to a regional area with satellite, it needs to be a seamless experience for those users, and they need to be able to maintain connectivity to critical applications as they switch.”
In order to do this, Ericsson writes specific drivers to sit on those routers, rather than using a generic driver, which monitors the connection and adapts to network changes so the router can continue to provide a stable, high-performance connection.
A concern for many respondents to Ericsson’s 2025 survey was that satellite connectivity was costly and that it wouldn’t integrate well with existing technologies – however, Ms Favolo encourages utilities to examine this a little more closely.
For her, it’s not about one technology being better than another, it’s about using the best tool for the job.
“We see that a hybrid approach of both cellular and satellite is often the most cost-effective solution for use cases where devices move from cellular-service areas to cellular blackspots and back,” she said.
However you slice it
With the rollout of 5G comes the power of true real-time data and monitoring. When IoT devices like sensors and smart meters are connected on the ‘local’ side of the router, Ms Favolo said that shifting the application workload and computing to the network’s edge significantly lowers the latency.
“It means you can make smart decisions about what information is transmitted and cut out the noise [created by data overload],” she said.
Another incredible leap forward in enterprise connectivity that comes with 5G is network slicing.
This involves creating a virtual network, or slice, that operates on top of shared 5G infrastructure. The latency, speed, reliability and security of each slice is then tailored to meet the needs of a specific application.
For long-life IoT devices, utilities could have one slice of the network that is designed to just transmit small data volumes, similar to the function of narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Then, they could have and then another that has reliable, secure high-bandwidth connectivity for calls or remote monitoring systems.
“As more users connect to the same network it becomes congested, [which] takes up [more] of the bandwidth and the performance lowers,” Ms Favolo said.
“But if I have a guaranteed slice of the network, then even if it’s overloaded I can still make video calls.”
Secure connection
Ericsson’s Cradlepoint routers are built to be enterprise grade devices, which means they need to be secure.
A local area network (LAN) connects devices within a single facility or a small area, and these networks can be set up to either bypass the public internet entirely, or only connect via a single, secure access point.
By not connecting to the public internet, utilities can easily ensure that their assets meet the requirements of the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI). However, if they can’t send data outside their private LAN, then their ability to benefit from digital innovation is limited.
A wide area network (WAN) connects multiple LANs to allow devices to communicate over a long distance – and by leveraging 5G and satellite connectivity utilities can create a private, secure wireless WAN (WWAN).
Ms Favolo explained that the key to a truly secure network is to take a zero-trust approach.
“In older VPN networks, if I’m connected with that VPN then I’d be able to connect to everyone on that same network. Our VPN is zero-trust, which means that closes the network down and only allows certain people to talk over the network,” she said.
Designed for scalability, Ericsson’s Secure Connect VPN can be deployed in minutes and is available as either a customer-hosted deployment or as a cloud-delivered service through NetCloud SASE, which enables Cradlepoint routers to securely access applications and data in the cloud.
This approach drastically reduces the potential attack surface. It also uses name-based routing to make the network, applications and data invisible to unauthorised devices.
Laying the foundations
For utilities that want full control of their own system, Ericsson offers NetCloud Manager, which is a single pane-of-glass remote management system that incorporates innovative AI to monitor and optimise network performance, as well as power usage for connected devices.
However, if they don’t have the in-house capability to take on that workload, then Ms Favolo said Ericsson and its partners can provide a fully managed solution.
“In a lot of cases, [a managed solution is] actually more cost effective,” Ms Favolo said.
“A great example is SA Power Networks, just six week after we did the rollout, they worked out they had a $5 million return on that investment.
“Because [workers in remote areas didn’t have to drive back and forth to make calls, they were saving time, which also meant that the job timeline resolution for issues was a lot shorter and they didn’t have to pay rebates.”
Ms Favolo said it’s also important to look at the value of network uptime, and compare that to impact of downtime and unreliability on both your budget and your business reputation.
“It’s not just the cost of connectivity [they need to] consider, but how much not investing is actually costing their business,” she said.
Ms Favolo said that 5G WWAN allows utilities to create networks that can be easily controlled and scaled up accommodate their business needs as well as emerging technologies.
“Things are changing really fast, and from a solution perspective, we need to make sure that you’re up to date with what’s happening in the market and we can support those predictive requirements in the future,” she said.
“I encourage utilities to ensure their chosen solution not only supports connectivity needs today but embraces whatever comes tomorrow.” U
