Verizon Business and Thames Freeport have completed one of Europe's largest private 5G deployments, switching on a multisite network across the Thames Freeport economic corridor in south-east England. The announcement was made in London on Tuesday 10 November 2026.

The network links five separate locations, each run by a different tenant with its own use cases. Every tenant network runs on an independent core, so each site keeps full control of its own data while sharing the same commercial hub.

Five sites, one platform

The sites covered are DP World London Gateway and DP World Logistics Park, Ford's Dagenham plant, and two locations at the Port of Tilbury. London Gateway is the UK's largest and most integrated deep-sea container port, while Ford Dagenham is the largest manufacturing site in London, having produced more than 11 million vehicles and 50 million engines. The Port of Tilbury, the largest of the Thames ports, is home to 135 supply chain companies.

Nokia Enterprise Campus Edge is the exclusive hardware and software provider for the networks, supplying its Digital Automation Cloud platform and MX Industrial Edge computing platform. The deployment was first announced in June 2025, and the completed network is now live.

What the network will be used for

Thames Freeport's Connectivity Innovation Lab has been testing use cases for the networks, focusing on maintenance and efficiency, tracking and monitoring, and health, safety and security. Trials already completed or under way include:

• Vehicle damage detection: AI spots damage to vehicles and trailers from images and video, and picked up damage that manual inspections had missed.
• Digital truck processing: a platform connecting terminals, depots and drivers, automating communication between gate, yard and operations teams.
• Mission-critical field communications: push-to-talk, video, location and emergency alert tools for field staff.
• A digital map of the container yard: showing the full container inventory, its location, age and planned movements.

A second phase of trials will look at ports and logistics uses, including digital twin simulation, AI video analysis for estate monitoring, natural language tools to help shift managers query terminal data, predictive maintenance and environmental monitoring.

Jobs and investment behind the project

Thames Freeport is a designated UK free trade zone, set up to boost growth and attract investment along the River Thames estuary. It has already helped create more than 1,400 jobs and secured over £2.13 billion of private investment since 2021. A further 1,290 people are employed across the tax sites, with 2,548 additional jobs in the confirmed pipeline. Its long-term growth plan aims to attract up to £4.9 billion of additional investment and support up to 28,000 jobs by 2045.

"The implementation at Thames Freeport is a perfect reference point for the versatility and scalability of private 5G across complex industrial sites," said Robb Juliano, vice president of 5G acceleration at Verizon Business. Tom White, innovation and skills director at Thames Freeport, said the deployment "gives our key sites a platform to innovate together while continuing to meet the realities of live industrial operations".

Verizon was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for 4G and 5G Private Mobile Network Services for the second year in a row, and received the highest vendor product score in Gartner's 2026 Critical Capabilities report for industrial, multisite and campus private mobile networks.