Snowplows, fuel trucks, cameras on the airport tram, shared ticket carts, and staff tablets all have to stay connected while they roll across the concrete. The Metropolitan Airports Commission, which owns Minneapolis-St. Paul International and six smaller Twin Cities airports, said on September 9 that the big airport had turned on a private fifth-generation cellular network from Ericsson for that work. Fifth-generation cellular is the current phone-network radio. Private means the airport owns the radios and the traffic does not ride the public Verizon or T-Mobile network. Eduardo Valencia, the commission's chief information officer, described the place this way: "We're basically running a city without residents" (Metropolitan Airports Commission, 2026).

I used to cycle a few kilometers to Meenambakkam Airport in Chennai and sit where I could see the wheels leave the ground. That habit never left. I still watch how an airport is put together, and I still use the lounge Wi-Fi when I travel. Wi-Fi is the short-range wireless most phones join inside a building. That lounge connection is the work of many vendors. The part passengers do not see is the airfield. Trucks and cameras out there cannot be counted, sent on a job, or watched if the signal dies between two wall boxes.

The airport passed on more Wi-Fi and more buried cable for the field

The commission said it had been running phones, cameras, and live work tools on Wi-Fi. Guest phones crowd that band. Buildings and parked gear on the field block it. A cart that rolls from one Wi-Fi box to the next can lose the session. The other option was to bury more fiber, which is glass cable in the ground, across a field with four runways. The commission chose its own cellular network instead, inside the buildings and outside on the five-square-mile campus (Metropolitan Airports Commission, 2026).

Insight Public Sector sold the Ericsson system and now runs it. Pierson Wireless put the radios in. Insight's write-up of the project says the plan uses 31 small outdoor radios. Indoors, it uses a slice of radio spectrum called Citizens Broadband Radio Service, a band the United States lets companies run for their own networks. Those indoor signals ride the distributed antenna system already in the terminals. That antenna system is the set of indoor antennas the public phone carriers already use, so a tablet can leave a gate and roll onto the field without a second indoor grid. Insight also says the network core can talk to fourth-generation cellular devices and fifth-generation devices at the same time, so older radios do not have to be thrown out (Insight).

Minneapolis-St. Paul handled more than 342,000 takeoffs and landings and more than 36 million passengers in 2025. The commission says it may later let airlines and shops on the concourse use the same network (Metropolitan Airports Commission, 2026).

Tram cameras left the cable, and airfield trucks keep two ways online

Bill Boyd runs infrastructure and operations in the commission's information technology group. He said the cameras on the airport tram used to hang on wired links. The private network now carries sharp video from those cameras while the tram moves. Ericsson names Axis Communications as the camera maker on that run (Ericsson, 2026; Metropolitan Airports Commission, 2026).

Dozens of airport vehicles carry Ericsson Cradlepoint routers. A router here is a small radio box in the truck that joins the cellular network. Crews use those boxes to open work apps out on the field. The box can stay on the airport's private network and jump to a public phone network if that second path is needed (Ericsson, 2026). Staff tablets and shared airline ticket machines sit on the same plan.

The airport tested this idea before. In 2022 the commission ran a private fourth-generation cellular trial on Citizens Broadband Radio Service for six jobs: tracking maintenance on the airfield, shared ticket carts, digital signs, cameras, sensors on buildings and pipes, and staff phones (RCR Wireless, 2022). Fourth-generation cellular is also called Long Term Evolution. The September announcement is the live network that followed that trial.

A plow and a tram camera have to stay on the work system after they leave the building. That is the job this network was bought to do.

Lounge Wi-Fi and the airfield radio do different jobs

When I sit in a lounge I am on passenger Wi-Fi. Check-in screens, shop tills, kitchen tickets, and public safety radios are other networks. Each one needs a backup. I wrote in May about Ericsson private fifth-generation cellular and Cradlepoint vehicle radios as the connection layer under cameras and small computers that sit on trucks and in warehouses (The Missing Layer: Sony and TSMC Complete the Physical AI Stack). Minneapolis-St. Paul is that layer on a working airfield, starting with cameras and trucks rather than a passenger app.

Pankaj Malhotra at Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions said airports now hang automation, video review, and live operations data on the same radios. The commission's own note says the network is also meant to support later analysis and automation. Those uses are listed as next work, not as results published on September 9.

About Shashi Bellamkonda

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