Private cellular in a box? It is hardly a novel idea, as Athonet and Druid Software will testify, including via commercial air-drop installations at music shows and war zones, or suchlike. But a new card-sized private 5G prototype from UK operator Vodafone looks genuinely meaningful, and differentiated from these other propositions. It hints at how the needle might be moved in this enterprise IoT story – that bare-bones 5G will, one day, be a box-shifting exercise for the old dealer channel.
