Fast, reliable communications have gone from nice-to-have to must-have. Today’s sophisticated enterprise applications demand greater network coverage and reliability. Employees today often work across locations—headquarters, satellite offices, and remotely—with a need for always-on communications and collaboration.

Enhanced connectivity is essential to operating at peak efficiency in today’s data-intensive business environments. 5G can make data and applications available anywhere in your office buildings or across a campus. And your organization’s services and vital information are accessible only to those with proper authorization.

With a hybrid 5G network, antennas can be strategically placed within and outside of your office buildings, working in concert with routers. That ensures ubiquitous coverage and reliable, low-latency connectivity across an office complex with less need for costly cabling. And with a “neutral-host” solution, businesses aren’t locked into a specific vendor, providing greater flexibility for users.

Fast, reliable connectivity is essential to business-critical applications used across industries. A 5G system lets you take advantage of various spectrum bands for different purposes. This kind of prioritization makes it possible to give preference to high-priority applications and avoid performance lags.

An earlier generation of network technologies predated many of the modern applications and data requirements that businesspeople now depend on—collaboration tools, secure data access, and streaming video. Now, with the growing adoption of enterprise applications that do all of that and more, organizations need enhanced wireless connectivity.

Private and hybrid 5G networks with private traffic controls can support the scalability, security, and performance requirements of today’s most demanding business applications and workloads. For businesses with data-intensive applications and stringent security requirements—and that describes organizations across many industries—5G can provide better service than Wi-Fi at a more feasible and attractive price point.

Hospital systems are a prime example. 5G can help reinvent healthcare in at least three ways: cost savings, patient access to quality care, and much-improved patient experiences.²

A major hospital in the U.S. was considering an upgrade to its Wi-Fi network ahead of a large-scale software migration. But when its executives learned the upgrade would require substantial upfront costs and be cumbersome to implement, they decided to go with 5G instead. Among the deciding factors was the fact that 5G required fewer antennas, which meant lower cabling costs. The 5G network also ensured sufficient signal propagation throughout its buildings and supported the software migration. And finally, adopting this 5G solution in an OpEx model offered significant advantages in time to resolution, should any issues arise.

The hospital had a demanding performance threshold: data had to be able to travel between devices—or “roundtrip”—with near-real-time performance of its clinical applications. 5G met and surpassed that requirement. The hospital’s employees now have access to patient records even when they travel between buildings and across campuses, which helps support better patient care and outcomes. The hospital chose to implement a neutral-host 5G solution for flexibility in which network providers could support the solution over time.

A company that conducts health tests, meanwhile, implemented a 5G network to support a satellite lab. In a research interview conducted on our behalf, the company’s head of IT said that prior to 5G, they were forced to rely on overnight shipping to transport test samples. That’s because they weren’t able to get a strong enough data connection within the hospital.

Now with 5G, the company can transmit lab-test data for analysis in near-real time. This cut the sample-to-results time from days to hours. “Implementation of 5G has been quite tremendous for us,” the IT executive said. “It essentially reduced the total number of days to process a test, simply by cutting two or three days of shipping time out of the equation.”

That’s a perfect illustration of why enhanced connectivity is so important—not just to application performance, but to business performance.