The Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) is helping expand access to shared wireless spectrum across the United States. Often referred to as “America’s Innovation Band,” CBRS supports a growing range of use cases across industries, including healthcare, agriculture, logistics, education and manufacturing. By allowing multiple users to efficiently share spectrum resources, CBRS has helped lower barriers to deployment and accelerate adoption of private wireless networks nationwide.
Manufacturers in particular are increasingly turning to CBRS-powered private 5G networks to modernize operations, improve productivity and support advanced technologies like robotics, AI and real-time monitoring. At the same time, recent studies have highlighted how important CBRS’s current technical framework is to supporting these industrial deployments reliably and at scale.
Analysys Mason estimates that roughly three-quarters of private 5G networks deployed in the U.S. currently rely on CBRS spectrum. Manufacturers are increasingly using these dedicated wireless networks to support connected equipment, automated systems and other advanced industrial applications.
CBRS is expected to play an even larger role in industrial connectivity over the next decade. Researchers project that 86% of private 5G networks deployed in the U.S. manufacturing sector will rely on CBRS by 2032 as companies continue investing in automation and advanced wireless technologies.
A recent technical analysis found that if proposed higher-power operations were applied to fewer than 2% of CBRS base stations, more than 65,000 channels could be lost across the CBRS ecosystem. The resulting interference could significantly reduce network performance for manufacturers and other industrial users that rely on CBRS’s shared-spectrum framework.
Source: Analysys Mason and Valo Analytica
