On the afternoon of October 29, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) Institute of Technology and Standards held its 2026 annual media briefing in Beijing. Wang Han, senior engineer of the Industrial Internet Research Department, presented the progress of industrial 5G standalone private networks, noting that the way 5G serves industry is changing—from public-network slicing to enterprise-built networks. The pilot documents define the standalone private network as: a dedicated network led and built by an industrial enterprise, carrying its production and management services, and capable of running without dependence on the public network. Enterprises thus turn from network tenants into network owners, clarifying “who builds it, who uses it, who manages it”—the answer to the question on which a batch of critical industries had previously stalled: whose network is this?
On the technical side, network-number rights confirmation is the key to the bottleneck. The standalone private network’s identity code is not allocated from the public big network but planned separately: China’s country code is 460, the three basic telecom operators each hold operator codes, and MIIT has now set the industry private-network code to 90, with the subsequent network identifiers pointing to a specific enterprise’s specific network—technically and administratively isolating the network and confirming accountability; terminal number ranges are likewise allocated by enterprise-reported terminal counts, clearly distinguished from the public network. On spectrum, after consultation among relevant bureaus, pilots are allowed to use operator frequencies once interference coordination is in place. Wang Han specifically cautioned that the outside world generally regards spectrum as the most critical element, but in terms of ownership and management rights, spectrum is only an underlying technical element—the network number is the link that confirms ownership. To prevent excessive customization from re-creating a fragmented “seven-kingdoms-eight-systems” landscape, CAICT has led more than 40 organizations—major equipment makers, the three basic telecom operators, solution providers and large industrial enterprises—in building the standalone private network standards family with a “1+6” structure, the overall technical requirements having been published first. Pilots proceed case by case: enterprises submit plans, industry authorities and MIIT bureaus are consulted, expert argumentation is organized, and each case is approved individually—nuclear-power projects, for instance, must first seek the opinion of the National Energy Administration.
Seen from the industry landscape, the deeper logic of this shift is the autonomy-and-control upgrade of industrial production networks. Wireless connectivity on factory floors has long been carried by various “small-wireless” systems, with fragmented standards, a technical legacy dominated by European and American vendors, and deep integration into automation systems; meanwhile China’s public mobile network leads the world in scale and quality with an autonomous, controllable industrial chain. The public-network slicing model, though replicable, cannot satisfy critical industries’ demand for complete control over their networks. Roles are being restructured accordingly: for industrial enterprises, moving from renting to building means 5G can deeply integrate with production processes, though construction and operations thresholds are real challenges; for basic telecom operators, the role shifts from network provider to comprehensive service provider, making deep service of large enterprises’ digital transformation a new proposition. The pilot is not merely about new network infrastructure—it also requires deep integration with on-site OT networks for data interconnection and interoperability, management platforms, cooperation models and security assurance. Standard-setting authority for 5G-OT convergence is converging toward a China-led system.
For Junyi Microelectronics, the advance of 5G standalone private networks opens new application space for “edge computing + industrial communications” systems. The 5G-EDGE-3399Pro edge computing host natively fuses 5G cellular connectivity with local compute—precisely the “network following compute down to the site” form in enterprise-built private networks; the J-3568/J-3576/J-3588 core boards can take on control duties in industrial gateways and protocol-conversion nodes, interfacing device access and data acquisition under standalone networks; K-series edge AI boards are suited to deployment at substation and line-side points covered by private networks, handling local inference and data pre-processing; the IPC-i5-1235U industrial mini PC can run enterprise management-platform clients and operations terminals; and touch-panel all-in-ones serve workshop-level human-machine interaction. As network-number confirmation clears the build-out bottleneck, edge-hardware demand on the private-network side will move from pilots to scaled replication.
Source: http://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-11-02/doc-inixkeus7131288.shtml (November 2, 2026)