Private 5G Factory Deployment in Thailand | NBTC 4800MHz 2026

In September 2025, Thailand’s NBTC announced it would open 100MHz within the 4,800MHz band to factories and enterprises free of charge. That announcement lowered the barrier to private 5G factory deployment in Thailand, but it does not make private 5G the right answer for every plant. The deciding factors are the number of connected devices, the size of the covered area, and whether you run applications such as AGVs where latency spikes are unacceptable. This article walks through the licence framework, the comparison criteria against Wi-Fi, and what the early Thai deployments actually showed.

What Private 5G Is and Where It Fits in a Factory Network

Private 5G is a 5G network that is separated from a carrier’s public network and operates entirely within a defined site. The base stations, the core network, and the devices are all run by the plant itself or by a partner acting on its behalf, and traffic does not leave the premises. From a plant manager’s perspective, it is close to having a dedicated mobile operator inside your own fence line.

The most common misunderstanding among manufacturing teams is that 5G is simply faster Wi-Fi. Peak throughput is not why private 5G is being evaluated for factory use. Three other properties matter far more.

• Low variance in latency, meaning the worst-case delay stays inside a bounded range rather than the average being low
• High device density, so you can blanket an area with sensors and tags without the network congesting
• Centralised control of the air interface, where the base station schedules transmissions instead of devices competing for airtime

The third point is the structural one. Wi-Fi is built on contention-based access, where devices grab the channel when they sense it is free. The more devices you add, and the more they move, the higher the probability that a given transmission waits. 5G uses scheduled access, where the base station allocates a transmission opportunity to each device. Because it is decided in advance who transmits and when, the worst-case figure does not blow out under load in the same way.

URLLC and mMTC in Plain Terms

Two 5G capability categories map directly onto factory problems. URLLC, or ultra-reliable low-latency communication, covers applications where delay and delivery guarantees are critical, such as remote control of AGVs or safety-related signalling. mMTC, or massive machine-type communication, covers collecting small payloads from very large numbers of endpoints, such as vibration sensors, temperature and humidity sensors, and asset tags. Traceability and equipment monitoring architectures are usually built from a combination of the two.

Private 5G Versus Carrier 5G

If you use a carrier’s public 5G inside a plant, both the radio design and the capacity allocation are decided by the operator’s priorities. You share capacity with other subscribers, and contractually guaranteeing the stability that production equipment control requires is difficult. Private 5G becomes a factory-grade option precisely because nothing is shared. The trade-off is that responsibility for procuring and operating the radio and core infrastructure moves onto your side of the line.

Inside the NBTC 4800MHz Announcement of September 2025

Private 5G suddenly became a realistic conversation in Thailand because of the spectrum policy NBTC set out in September 2025. According to NBTC Commissioner Somphop Purivigraipong, the regulator intends to open 100MHz of the 4,800MHz band, free of charge, so that factories and enterprises can build their own networks.

The PNO Licence Framework

This is not unlicensed spectrum that anyone may switch on. It is granted as a Private Network Operator, or PNO, licence, issued on an application basis. You are spared the large auction outlay, but you still have to apply and pass review.

The intended recipients are factories, enterprises, industrial estate operators, and local government bodies. The inclusion of industrial estate operators matters practically for Japanese manufacturers in Thailand, because it means there are two possible routes. You can apply in your own name, or you can potentially ride on infrastructure provided by the industrial estate where your plant is located.

The Non-Commercial Condition

The PNO licence carries explicit usage conditions. Use is restricted to non-commercial purposes aimed at improving the licence holder’s own production efficiency. Providing communication services to third parties, in other words reselling connectivity, is not permitted. If you want to offer a commercial service, you must go through a separate auction bidding process.

There is a second constraint that is easy to overlook. Licence holders cannot interwork or roam with existing commercial 5G services in the 2,600MHz band. The design implication is significant. You cannot assume a device will use private 5G inside the fence and then hand over seamlessly to carrier 5G outside it. Devices that stay on site and devices that travel off site need to be designed as separate populations from the start.

The Spectrum Is Free, the Operation Is Not

According to Thai domestic reporting from outlets such as bangkokbiznews and mcot.net, while the spectrum allocation itself is free, an annual spectrum usage fee in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 baht is expected. At that level, the fee itself will not be what blocks a project.

The point worth keeping in perspective is that reducing the spectrum cost to near zero does not make industrial 5G cheap overall. What was waived is one narrow slice of the cost structure. Base stations, the core network, device-side modules, and the operating organisation all still cost what they cost. Reading the announcement as “5G is now affordable” is inaccurate. The accurate reading is that a door which was effectively closed, because it required auction participation, has been reopened as an application process.

Where the Policy Actually Stands Today

One point deserves emphasis. This is a policy announced as of September 2025. As of the time of writing, there is no publicly confirmed record of PNO licences actually being issued to individual factories. Planning on the assumption that many plants are already running under this framework would therefore be unwise. Treat it as a published, applicable framework, and confirm the current operating rules and application forms directly with NBTC or with a local operator or system integrator.

How Private 5G Differs from Industrial Wi-Fi

“Our Wi-Fi works, so why 5G?” is the first question in every evaluation. Being able to answer it with numbers is what gets an internal budget request moving.

Tail Latency Is the Metric That Matters

According to vendor technical material, Wi-Fi 6 can reach tail latency of up to 264ms when a device roams between access points. Tail latency describes the rare worst case rather than the average. The same material states that private 5G, through scheduled access, stays under 45ms at the 99.99th percentile.

This difference matters because it is invisible in average figures. Even if the average Wi-Fi delay is a few milliseconds, a 264ms gap at the moment of roaming means an AGV in motion receives no control signal during that window. On a laptop or tablet, a user simply notices a brief stutter. On a moving vehicle or an inline inspection station, it becomes a safety design problem.

The same source reports that in fleet-level remote control of AGVs, private 5G delivers 99.9% of packets with less than 10ms of delay. These figures come from technical material a vendor publishes to explain the advantages of its own technology, not from neutral third-party comparative testing, and should be read with that in mind. In a real plant, building structure, metal fixtures, and interference sources will move the numbers.

The Comparison at a Glance

Where Total Cost of Ownership Crosses Over

On the cost side, vendor material offers a useful reference point. For large plants exceeding 100,000 square feet of floor area, roughly 9,300 square metres, private 5G is estimated to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 53%. Conversely, for smaller sites with fewer than 50 connected devices, the vendor’s own guidance is that Wi-Fi 6 is the more efficient choice.

In practice, use those two numbers like this. Start by writing down the floor area you need to cover and the device count you expect to reach within five years. If the area comfortably exceeds 9,300 square metres and the device count is heading into the hundreds, private 5G deserves serious evaluation. If you are looking at a single building with a few dozen devices, revisiting your industrial Wi-Fi design will almost certainly give you a better return. For the design and cost structure of conventional industrial Wi-Fi, we break the spend into five layers in Factory Wireless LAN and Industrial Network Design 2026 – 5 Cost Layers.

Budget by Layer, Not by Headline Number

There is no published market rate for most industrial 5G line items, and inventing one is dangerous. Rather than quoting figures, here are the cost layers you should insist on seeing broken out in any quotation.

Break the cost down this way and it becomes obvious that free spectrum only affects the first layer. It also becomes obvious that how you design layers two through five is what makes the total vary by several times.

Which Plants and Which Applications Benefit

Beyond the technical comparison, what teams really want to know is which process in their own plant this helps. Private 5G characteristics pay off in the following areas.

AGV and AMR Remote Control and Fleet Management

This is the clearest use case. If transport vehicles move continuously across a large site, handovers between access points happen constantly. Stable tail latency translates directly into transport throughput and safety margin. The more vehicles you run and the wider the travel area, the more the 5G advantage shows.

Machine Vision and Visual Inspection

Architectures that stream high-resolution camera feeds to an edge node or server for inference demand uplink capacity and stability. In an inspection step you cannot stop, a dropped feed or a verdict that arrives too late becomes a yield or escape problem immediately. The value of 5G rises when you also need to add cameras where cabling is difficult, or when layout changes are frequent enough that re-running cable is a recurring cost.

Digital Twins and Area-Wide Equipment Visibility

Architectures that gather equipment status, power, and environmental data across an entire area and reproduce it in real time push device counts up sharply. This is where mMTC device density pays off, and where you retain the freedom to add measurement points later without congesting the network. The same applies when you progressively add read points per process step for traceability.

Remote Work Support and Knowledge Transfer

When engineers from the Japanese parent company or from a vendor cannot travel to site, this covers sharing high-quality camera feeds from the floor and giving instructions interactively. The Thai proof of concept described below started from exactly this area.

When Not to Bother

Equally, there are conditions where there is no urgency. A single building with a few dozen devices, endpoints that are fixed rather than mobile, and no operational problems with the existing Wi-Fi all point the same way. In those cases, revisiting channel planning, roaming configuration, and access point placement usually resolves the issue at far lower cost. The rule is to start from which specific metric is falling short today, not from an assumption that 5G will improve something.

One more design note. Introducing wireless into a plant means designing OT security alongside the network. Private 5G is separated from the public network, but the core and its management plane still connect to IT systems, so zone segmentation and boundary defence apply exactly as before. We cover factory security design around IEC 62443 in OT Security for Manufacturing in Thailand – 2026 Guide.

The Thai Precedent – KDDI, Nippon Koei and Daikin Thailand

The publicly documented private 5G trial in Thailand is the work carried out by KDDI, through KDDI Thailand, together with Nippon Koei. It ran from 24 January 2022 to early March 2022, at the Daikin Industries (Thailand) plant inside the Amata City Chonburi industrial estate.

Technically, the trial covered a zone of roughly 120 metres square using three 5G base stations compliant with 3GPP and O-RAN. Nippon Koei handled overall project management, while KDDI was responsible for equipment installation and network construction.

Two applications were validated.

• Remote work support using 4K 360-degree cameras and wearable cameras
• Failure prediction and operational monitoring through AI analysis of IP camera video and equipment operating sound

There is an important caveat in how to read this case. It was a 2022 trial, carried out before the PNO licence framework NBTC announced in 2025 existed. The spectrum conditions that applied then may therefore differ from the framework you can apply for now. Treat it as a reference for technical feasibility and application fit, not as a template for licensing procedure.

There is a second practical lesson. Roughly 120 metres square, covered by three base stations, is a deliberately bounded scope. Rather than covering an entire plant from day one, starting with a specific zone and a specific application where the effect can actually be measured is the realistic approach to a trial.

What Japan’s Local 5G Experience Tells Us About Getting It Right

Japanese manufacturers may be more familiar with Japan’s local 5G scheme. As a reference for the technology’s effect, it is worth looking at the figures published there.

According to NTT East, compared with 4G, 5G offers roughly ten times the theoretical throughput, roughly ten times better latency precision, and thirty to forty times the number of simultaneously connected devices. Demonstration projects run by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications have reported cases of average efficiency improvements in the range of 15 to 30 percent in manufacturing applications. As a concrete example, Sumitomo Corporation applied local 5G to automating product inspection by combining 8K camera video with AI.

What must never be conflated is that Japan’s local 5G scheme and Thailand’s NBTC PNO licence are different frameworks in different countries. The regulator, the allocated band, and the usage conditions all differ. Experience applying in Japan does not carry over to Thailand, and Thai PNO conditions cannot be assessed against Japanese assumptions.

The transferable insight from the Japanese numbers is about how benefits actually materialise, not about regulation. An average improvement of 15 to 30 percent is not something 5G delivers automatically. It appears only when the network upgrade is paired with redesigning the work itself around data volumes and response times that were previously impossible over wireless, as in the 8K AI inspection example. If you upgrade the network and keep running the same processes over it, the investment will not pay back. Before you budget a private 5G project, define at least one new capability that becomes possible specifically because of 5G.

How to Get from Application to Operation

Here is the general sequence. Specific timelines and costs vary enormously with site conditions, so this focuses on order and on what each stage must produce. As a rule of thumb rather than a published standard, for a scoped small start, planning from requirements definition to the beginning of a trial in around 90 days is a realistic approach, though the licence review period varies with how the framework is being administered, so build in margin.

1. Define the application and the KPI. Decide which process, which metric, and how much improvement, before anything else. Moving to equipment selection while this is vague guarantees failure
2. Assess the current network. Confirm with actual latency and disconnection logs whether the existing Wi-Fi is genuinely causing problems
3. Survey the radio environment. Walk the target area to check structures, metal fixtures, and interference sources, and estimate the number of cells required
4. Prepare the PNO licence application. Assemble material that demonstrates the non-commercial nature of the use, the applications, and the target area
5. File with NBTC and respond to review. Confirm current forms and conditions with NBTC or a local system integrator
6. Design and procure. Quote the radio, core, and device layers separately and compare on a five-year TCO basis
7. Build and measure. Take real measurements after installation and compare against the design values
8. Run a proof of concept in a bounded zone. Measure against the KPI. Keep the scope tight, as in the KDDI and Nippon Koei trial
9. Roll out to production and integrate with OT. Settle monitoring, incident response, and security operating rules before expanding

Steps 1 and 4 are where Japanese-affiliated plants most often stumble. Step 1 tends to become “let us put 5G in and see what it can do”, but without a KPI the production rollout will not clear an internal approval. Step 4 requires explaining non-commercial use in terms of what the Thai entity actually does, and simply translating documents prepared in Japan often fails to satisfy that.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does private 5G cost

Industrial 5G cost breaks into five layers, covering spectrum, radio access, core network, device side, and operations. Under the NBTC policy the spectrum itself is free, with an expected annual spectrum usage fee of 5,000 to 10,000 baht. The remaining four layers determine the total, and they can vary by several times depending on covered area and device count. This is not an investment for which a single market rate can be quoted, so insist on a layer-by-layer breakdown and compare on five-year total cost of ownership.

Can anyone apply for the NBTC licence in Thailand

The intended recipients are factories, enterprises, industrial estate operators, and local government bodies. Because it is granted on an application basis, you must meet the conditions and pass review. The key conditions are that the use is non-commercial and aimed at improving your own production efficiency, that you cannot provide commercial services to third parties, and that you cannot interwork or roam with existing 5G services in the 2,600MHz band. Commercial provision requires separate auction bidding.

What AGV 5G latency should we actually expect

According to vendor technical material, in fleet-level remote control of AGVs private 5G delivers 99.9% of packets with less than 10ms of delay, and overall stays under 45ms at the 99.99th percentile. For comparison, Wi-Fi 6 can reach tail latency of up to 264ms when roaming. These are vendor figures, and real plants vary with building structure and interference sources, so run a proof of concept that includes real measurement in your target area before committing.

Do we have to replace all our existing Wi-Fi

No. The realistic approach is division of roles rather than replacement. Office devices, fixed endpoints, and general information-system traffic remain perfectly well served by existing Wi-Fi. Assign private 5G to the areas where latency variance or device density is genuinely causing problems, such as mobile equipment control, devices crossing wide areas, and dense measurement grids. Below 50 connected devices, the vendor’s own guidance is that Wi-Fi 6 is more efficient anyway.

How long does deployment take

For a scoped small start, planning around 90 days from requirements definition to the start of a trial is a common approach. That 90-day figure is a planning rule of thumb rather than a published standard. However, the time required for PNO licence review depends on how the framework is being administered, so treat it as a separate line in the schedule rather than folding it into that estimate. Because the policy was announced in September 2025 and no issuance to individual factories is publicly confirmed at the time of writing, build the schedule conservatively.

Summary

Here are the points that matter for a private 5G factory deployment decision in Thailand.

• NBTC announced in September 2025 that it will open 100MHz within the 4,800MHz band free of charge to factories and enterprises, granted as a PNO licence on an application basis
• Use is restricted to non-commercial purposes aimed at improving your own production efficiency. Commercial service provision is not permitted, and interworking or roaming with 2,600MHz 5G services is not allowed
• The spectrum is free, but an annual spectrum usage fee of around 5,000 to 10,000 baht is expected, on top of base station, core, device, and operations costs
• According to vendor material, Wi-Fi 6 can reach tail latency of up to 264ms when roaming, while private 5G is reported to stay under 45ms at the 99.99th percentile, with 99.9% of AGV remote control packets under 10ms
• For plants above 100,000 square feet, roughly 9,300 square metres, one vendor estimate puts the TCO reduction at up to 53%, while below 50 connected devices Wi-Fi 6 is the more efficient choice
• The publicly documented Thai case is the 2022 trial by KDDI, Nippon Koei and Daikin Thailand, carried out before the PNO framework existed
• The framework is still at the announced-policy stage. Confirm current operating rules with NBTC or a local system integrator

The order of decisions is straightforward. First, establish with numbers what your current network is failing to deliver. Second, write down your target coverage area and your five-year device count. With those two in hand, whether Wi-Fi improvements are sufficient or private 5G is warranted usually becomes clear very quickly.

TOMAS TECH supports Japanese manufacturers operating in Thailand with production DX and automation on the shop floor, including the PEGASUS production management system. On private 5G, we are happy to start well before any deployment decision, at the stage of working out what your plant’s actual constraint is and which numbers to measure first. Early-stage enquiries are entirely welcome, so please reach out through our contact page.

References

• Bangkok Post – NBTC spectrum policy for private networks
• Bangkok Post – 4800MHz band allocation for factories and enterprises
• bangkokbiznews – NBTC 4800MHz open access report
• MCOT – NBTC private network spectrum report
• KDDI Thailand – KDDI and Nippon Koei 5G proof of concept news release
• GXC – How Private 5G Outperforms Wi-Fi 6
• NTT East BizDrive – Local 5G in factories