June 23, 2026
Latency Benchmarks for Private 5G Networks
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Deploying 5G alongside older wireless systems like Wi-Fi, LTE, and NB-IoT can be challenging due to interference, spectrum congestion, and compatibility issues. This article outlines seven practical strategies to ensure these technologies work together smoothly, focusing on interference management, performance improvements, and cost-effective integration. Here’s a quick overview:
These strategies address interference, enhance network performance, and streamline the transition to 5G, making them essential for organisations managing complex wireless environments.
5G and Legacy Wireless Coexistence Strategies Comparison
Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that combines Wi‑Fi 7 and private 5G brings together the strengths of both technologies. This integration reduces interference while delivering the high performance needed for demanding enterprise applications.
Wi‑Fi 7 uses spectrum puncturing to access non-contiguous frequency bands dynamically, which helps minimise interference from older systems and nearby 5G signals. Its Multi‑Link Operation (MLO) feature allows simultaneous data transmission across the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands, effectively shifting traffic away from congested channels. When paired with Call Admission Control (CAC) – which manages connections based on bit rate – this setup can boost network throughput by an impressive 127% and reduce video call blocking by 97.4%.
This ability to handle interference paves the way for a smoother, more efficient network experience.
Wi‑Fi 7 can deliver speeds of up to 46 Gbps, while private 5G reaches up to 20 Gbps. Together, they achieve sub-millisecond latency, which is crucial for applications like automated robotics and real-time control.
"Integrating Wi‑Fi 7 with private 5G in CPE devices can help ensure reliable, gigabit‑level speeds, robust security, and centralized management across diverse deployment scenarios."
- 5G Technology World
This combination also addresses coverage issues. Wi‑Fi 7 excels in indoor environments with advanced beamforming and wider 320 MHz channels, while private 5G provides strong outdoor coverage with its massive MIMO capabilities. Together, they create seamless connectivity, even in complex industrial settings.
In addition to performance improvements, these integrated systems are designed to work alongside legacy systems with minimal disruption. This is achieved through ATSSS (Access Traffic Steering, Switching, and Splitting), a feature defined in 3GPP Release 16. ATSSS allows CPE devices to dynamically balance traffic between 5G and Wi‑Fi based on real-time conditions like interference and congestion.
For organisations with older IoT devices, 5G RedCap bridges the gap between 5G New Radio and legacy LTE‑M or NB‑IoT standards. This reduces device complexity and power consumption, making it easier to support both older and newer technologies. Centralised control platforms further simplify operations, offering unified management for both private 5G and Wi‑Fi 7 networks. With IDC predicting over 2 billion Wi‑Fi 7 devices in use by 2028, enterprises can adopt this integrated approach without needing extensive infrastructure upgrades.
Carrier sensing and channel coordination are key to enabling 5G and older systems to share spectrum effectively. These methods ensure both technologies can operate in the same frequency bands, particularly in the busy 5–7 GHz unlicensed spectrum.
Carrier sensing involves network nodes "listening" to the spectrum before transmitting to ensure the channel is clear. However, differences in sensing thresholds can lead to 5G nodes accessing the medium more aggressively, potentially impacting bandwidth availability for legacy systems.
Implicit Channel Coordination (ICC) offers a solution by allowing legacy Wi‑Fi systems to influence 5G base stations. This process enables Wi‑Fi access points to guide 5G base stations in selecting specific precoding matrices. These matrices cancel out 5G downlink signals at the Wi‑Fi receiver, allowing both systems to transmit simultaneously without interference.
"Our design outperforms prior work by achieving an overall 30% higher data rate of the 5G and Wi‑Fi coexistence system, 3× improvement in spectrum access fairness, and 1.5× in system capacity, all while conforming with the latency requirements of 5G."
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) takes a different route by coordinating how 5G and LTE share frequency bands. It integrates 5G reference signals into the legacy LTE grid, avoiding clashes with critical legacy signals like Cell-specific Reference Signals (CRS). Techniques such as "puncturing" and "rate matching" ensure 5G transmissions steer clear of legacy control signals. In environments prone to interference, these coordination methods can boost network rates by 60%. By mitigating interference, these strategies enhance overall network performance.
These techniques also bring substantial cost advantages. DSS enables operators to roll out 5G through software updates on existing radio units, avoiding the need for costly new carrier deployments. This approach eliminates the lengthy and expensive process of spectrum refarming, which can take up to a decade as users transition between generations. For instance, the 2020 Priority Access Licences auction for the shared 3.5 GHz CBRS band in the United States generated around £3.5 billion.
Beyond interference reduction, these methods deliver notable performance gains. Cross‐band spectrum sharing schemes have demonstrated improvements in LTE throughput by 13.5% and 5G NR throughput by 8.3% on average, alongside a 20.7% increase in spectrum utilisation efficiency.
DSS also allows operators to achieve nationwide 5G coverage by using existing low‐band legacy spectrum rather than waiting for new high-frequency infrastructure. The technology dynamically adjusts resource allocation every millisecond based on real‐time traffic demands, ensuring optimal performance for both 5G and legacy users.
5G RedCap, or Reduced Capability, is designed specifically for low-power and IoT devices, acting as a bridge between cutting-edge 5G networks and older wireless systems. This makes it an ideal solution for organisations looking to upgrade their infrastructure while still maintaining compatibility with their existing systems. By connecting high-performance 5G technology with legacy networks, RedCap ensures modernisation without compromising the reliability of established systems. It’s a focused approach that complements earlier strategies by improving integration with older systems and reducing interference issues.
To ensure seamless compatibility, RedCap devices undergo rigorous coexistence testing. Standards like ANSI C63.27 and AIM 7351731 are followed to confirm integration across a range of devices, including those used in medical, consumer, and industrial sectors. Early Stage Qualification (ESQ) during the design phase plays a crucial role in identifying potential risks, while tailored tests under simulated high-traffic conditions provide insights into how devices will perform in real-world scenarios.
Early and thorough testing isn’t just about reliability – it’s also a cost-effective strategy. By addressing potential issues before deployment, organisations can avoid expensive failures. This is especially important in industries with significant legacy infrastructure, such as healthcare, industrial operations, and transportation.
Another key focus of RedCap deployment is managing interference. Detailed testing identifies potential issues and evaluates how devices handle existing signals, ensuring that RedCap doesn’t disrupt the performance of legacy systems. Immunity testing further ensures that devices meet performance expectations, allowing for design improvements before scaling up deployment. This careful approach ensures that RedCap devices work smoothly alongside existing networks.
Spectrum puncturing and multi-resource units (MRUs) provide a practical way to manage the overlap between 5G and legacy LTE systems. Puncturing works by "muting" specific resource elements in the 5G signal that would otherwise interfere with essential LTE signals, such as Cell-specific Reference Signals (CRS). These CRS signals are fixed in the time–frequency grid and are crucial for LTE devices to stay synchronised and perform channel estimation. By steering clear of these positions, 5G can share the same spectrum without disrupting existing LTE operations.
Puncturing plays a key role in separating critical LTE signals from 5G data streams. As Rony K. Saha and John M. Cioffi explain in the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society:
"To address the collision with CRS, which exists across the whole LTE bandwidth, LTE CRS puncturing or NR puncturing is employed."
This method protects 5G synchronisation signal blocks and control channels from interference caused by legacy LTE transmissions. Combined with rate matching, puncturing can increase network speeds by up to 60% in areas with high interference. However, as the number of LTE antenna ports grows, more aggressive puncturing may be needed, which could potentially reduce overall capacity.
Beyond managing interference, spectrum puncturing simplifies the integration of 5G into existing LTE bands. This technique allows 5G to be deployed on current LTE bands without requiring hardware upgrades for legacy devices. Its backward compatibility enables organisations to introduce 5G gradually while continuing to support their LTE infrastructure. Compared to spectrum refarming – which can take up to a decade to complete – this approach is far more cost-efficient.
These strategies not only safeguard legacy signals but also enhance data delivery during peak demand. Multi-resource units enable dynamic allocation based on real-time traffic needs, which is especially beneficial in dense industrial IoT environments [13,15]. Advanced spectrum sharing schemes can boost throughput by around 5% and improve service delivery by 10% in networks where LTE and 5G coexist. For organisations aiming to optimise efficiency, rate matching is a recommended technique. By adjusting data encoding to bypass legacy signals instead of simply dropping data in conflicting areas, it ensures smoother performance.
APIs and middleware act as a bridge between modern 5G networks and older wireless systems, allowing integration without the need for expensive hardware replacements. By shifting to a Service Based Architecture (SBA), traditional telecom signalling protocols are replaced with RESTful APIs, making application development more accessible for web developers. This API-first approach complements other methods for integrating 5G and legacy systems, ensuring they work together seamlessly.
One of the biggest challenges in enterprise environments is navigating firewall restrictions. Enterprise firewalls often block inbound sockets, making bidirectional signalling a real headache. Middleware solutions, especially those using WebSocket technology, tackle this problem by routing all signalling exchanges through a single outbound socket. This eliminates the need for complex firewall reconfigurations.
Mark Grayson, a Cisco Fellow, highlights the benefits of this approach:
"The WebSocket solution enables private networks to configure simplified firewall rules. All outbound and inbound signalling exchanges between the private 5G access network and the remote credential holder are transported on a single socket."
A practical example of this was showcased in September 2022 during the 5G DRIVE project, a collaboration led by Virgin Media O2 and supported by the UK Government’s DCMS. In the demonstration, a subscriber successfully roamed onto a private 5G network operated by a fictional company, "Acme-Industrial." The system efficiently managed user equipment registration and de-registration, showing how this method not only simplifies firewall management but also strengthens network coexistence.
These solutions go beyond making connectivity easier – they also save money. Middleware and gateway devices provide a cost-effective way to link incompatible systems without resorting to full hardware upgrades. This is especially important as the number of private cellular networks is expected to grow exponentially, far outnumbering the roughly 800 public cellular operators currently active.
The adoption of federation-based approaches like OpenRoaming further underscores this point. With more than 1 million private wireless hotspots already using OpenRoaming, the practicality and cost-effectiveness of these integration strategies are clear.
Firecell offers a fully integrated private 5G solution that simplifies deployment by removing the need for multiple vendors. Instead of piecing together components from various suppliers, businesses receive a complete package covering everything from network design to installation and ongoing maintenance. This streamlined approach is particularly effective in tackling interference issues that often occur when 5G operates alongside older systems in shared or neighbouring spectrum bands.
Firecell’s strategy for interference-free networks relies on assigning dedicated bandwidth and using advanced planning tools. These tools simulate interference scenarios and optimise antenna and base station placement to ensure broad coverage with minimal equipment.
For companies using the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band, Firecell incorporates General Authorised Access (GAA) frameworks for intelligent spectrum sharing. Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technology also takes advantage of unused "white spaces" in the spectrum, ensuring efficient use without disrupting other systems. Additionally, sophisticated algorithms keep interference levels in check, enabling private 5G networks to operate smoothly alongside legacy infrastructure. This careful interference management ensures a seamless integration process.
Firecell’s solutions are designed to work harmoniously with existing enterprise networks right from the start. They support zero-trust architecture and secure zones to safeguard sensitive data while remaining compatible with older IT systems. Before full deployment, companies can use lab testing in an open-source 5G environment to fine-tune and validate their setup. Centralised control and automation tools allow IT teams to monitor performance and enforce protocols from a single dashboard, cutting down on the resources typically needed for multi-vendor systems. Additionally, detailed planning tools help identify physical barriers and potential interference sources during site surveys, making the installation process smoother. By prioritising security and ease of management, Firecell ensures private 5G networks integrate effortlessly with legacy systems.
Firecell’s approach also helps businesses save money. The platform’s flexibility allows users to choose between licensed, unlicensed, or shared spectrum options based on their budget and performance needs. Edge computing reduces latency and backhaul costs, while a dedicated TCO calculator provides clear budgeting insights. For larger sites, a scalable subscription model minimises upfront costs, ensuring companies only pay for the connectivity they require. Additionally, the network supports predictive maintenance by analysing real-time sensor data, identifying potential issues early, and extending the life of existing equipment.
Getting 5G to work seamlessly alongside legacy systems requires thorough coexistence testing. Before rolling out a private 5G network in environments like hospital operating theatres, manufacturing plants, or logistics centres, rigorous testing in these high-stakes settings is a must. This process builds on established interference management techniques to ensure everything works smoothly under real-world conditions.
A key focus of testing is identifying "spectrum islands" – areas where 5G and legacy systems can coexist without interfering with each other. For example, in December 2025, researchers at Oulu University Hospital in Finland conducted a 24-hour wideband spectrum test (0.4–6.1 GHz) as part of the Hola 5G project. Using an Agilent E4446A spectrum analyser paired with MATLAB automation, they determined that 5G signals in the 3.9–4.1 GHz band caused no interference with adjacent LTE and Wi-Fi bands. Additionally, RF exposure levels remained well within ICNIRP and WHO safety limits, making the network suitable for critical applications like surgical video transmission.
To minimise self-interference during tests, disable unnecessary wireless interfaces on test devices and rely on wired Ethernet connections. Ensure all instruments are calibrated before starting, and verify that interferer signals stay between –70 and –90 dBc. High-resolution filters can further enhance isolation by 40–60 dB, complementing standard antenna designs. Once interference is under control, the next step is to evaluate performance metrics.
After confirming minimal interference, check if both 5G and legacy systems meet performance requirements. This includes measuring packet error rates (PER) to see how interference affects receive sensitivity, especially for ultra-reliable, low-latency applications in medical or industrial settings. Conduct 24-hour wideband scans to catch any short-term interference events that could disrupt critical operations.
Using automated instrumentation control can standardise results and eliminate variability caused by human error during extended testing. This method helps verify whether 5G networks can achieve sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% reliability while ensuring that existing Wi-Fi and LTE systems continue to function without performance drops.
This table provides a clear overview of the deployment challenges and coverage capabilities of various coexistence strategies, helping you choose the right fit for your specific needs.
| Strategy | Deployment Complexity | Coverage Area |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Wi‑Fi 7 & Private 5G CPE | Medium | Approx. 185 m² for Wi‑Fi; extensive for 5G |
| 2. Carrier Sensing (DSS) | Low | Wide (leveraging low‑band coverage) |
| 3. 5G RedCap | Low/Medium | Broad (sub‑6 GHz) |
| 4. API/Middleware (RADIUS) | Medium | Not applicable (logic layer) |
| 5. Firecell Turnkey Solutions | Low | Suitable for areas exceeding 10,000 m² |
| 6. Coexistence Testing | High | Not applicable |
Integrating Wi‑Fi 7 can cut connection setup times by up to 90%, making it perfect for dense indoor spaces. For expansive facilities over 10,000 m², Firecell’s Pegasus Network provides a scalable 5G solution with simplified management and robust service-level agreements.
Dynamic options like DSS are ideal for achieving nationwide scalability. DSS offers a cost-efficient way to upgrade existing LTE infrastructure with software, while 5G RedCap is tailored for IoT, delivering efficient downlink speeds of 100–220 Mbps.
Logical integrations also play a vital role. API and middleware solutions using RADIUS protocols streamline legacy system management, unifying identity management and enforcing policies effectively. On the other hand, coexistence testing, though complex, is crucial for ensuring networks meet the demanding reliability standards of 99.999% uptime in critical environments.
This breakdown highlights how these strategies align with the goal of delivering interference-free, dependable network performance in challenging industrial settings.
Balancing 5G with older wireless technologies doesn’t have to be overly complex. The seven strategies mentioned earlier effectively address challenges like interference, resource allocation, and hardware-based solutions. From blending Wi-Fi 7 with private 5G in CPE devices to thorough coexistence testing, each method targets specific obstacles to ensure smooth, high-performance connectivity.
These strategies don’t just resolve technical issues – they bring real-world advantages. For instance, some approaches can dramatically increase throughput and cut down on service interruptions. Consider this: 5G can handle up to 1 million devices within 0.38 square miles, a massive leap from the 2,000 devices supported by 4G in the same area. This isn’t just a theoretical gain – it directly benefits industries like manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare by enabling more reliable and efficient operations.
"Coexistence is the goal: allowing all the radios, protocols and standards to operate without causing problems within the same connected environment." – Qorvo Technical Article
For organisations managing facilities over 10,000 m², Firecell’s Pegasus Network offers a ready-to-use solution with scalable 5G infrastructure and strong service-level agreements. This means you can focus on running your operations while leaving network management to the experts. Whether it’s the Pegasus Pop-up for mobile setups starting at £32,900 or the full Pegasus Network for larger deployments, the priority is interference-free and dependable connectivity.
With mobile data traffic doubling every two to three years and global 5G connections expected to reach 7.7 billion by 2028, adopting these strategies now ensures your organisation stays ahead. As 5G-Advanced and 6G come into play, integrated spectrum sharing will become even more critical for future networks.
Choosing the right connectivity solution – Wi‑Fi 7, private 5G, or a hybrid CPE approach – depends entirely on what your enterprise requires.
Each option brings distinct advantages tailored to specific use cases.
When 5G operates on the same spectrum as Wi-Fi or LTE, interference can become a challenge. One effective way to tackle this is through spectrum sharing mechanisms, like dynamic spectrum sharing. This approach allows multiple users to share the same frequency bands in a controlled manner, reducing interference and promoting smoother operation between these technologies.
Before rolling out a private 5G network, it’s essential to conduct coexistence testing in conditions that mirror actual usage. This involves carrying out electromagnetic compatibility tests to check for interference and running pilot deployments to confirm the network integrates seamlessly with existing systems. These steps help identify and resolve potential issues early, ensuring a smoother deployment process.
