Ontario International Airport in Southern California has chosen Boldyn Networks to design, build and run a private 4G and 5G network, starting with physical security and perimeter intrusion detection. Announced on 24 September, the system combines its own mobile network with computing on the airport site and cloud-based management, and will expand to camera coverage across the airport’s 1,700-acre grounds.
Boldyn will monitor the network around the clock from its network and security operations centres.
“Investing in a private wireless network gives Ontario International Airport the operational autonomy necessary to manage and secure our more than 1,700-acre footprint with precision,” said Chuck Miwa, the airport authority’s chief information officer.
The choice of first job is telling: of everything an airport could connect, Ontario started with its fence.
The Perimeter Problem
That is because the edges of an airport are hard to watch. An Associated Press investigation a decade ago found intruders breached airport perimeters at major US airports roughly every 10 days, counting at least 345 incidents at 31 airports between 2004 and early 2016.
A case in May showed how little time security teams can have. At Denver International Airport, a perimeter sensor went off at 11:10 pm, a man climbed an eight-foot fence at 11:13, and about two minutes later he was struck by a departing jet. Airport chief executive Phil Washington said the camera view had been alternating between wildlife and the individual, who also dropped out of sight in nearby ditches.
Denver has 36 miles of fencing around 53 square miles, watched by patrols, cameras and ground radar, and still had seconds rather than minutes to react. The lesson for any airport is that detecting an intrusion is only half the job; the other half is getting clear video to the right person fast enough to act.
Why Build A Private Mobile Network
That is where a private network earns its place, because cameras and sensors spread across runways, fences and service roads are expensive to wire, and Wi-Fi struggles to cover large outdoor areas reliably. A private mobile network uses the same kind of technology as a public carrier, but only the airport’s own devices can join it, and the airport decides what gets priority.
Video is the heavy load, since security cameras send far more data than they receive, a strain on networks we looked at in AI’s uplink surge, and processing that footage on site keeps it local and cuts the delay before an operator sees an alert.
Mobility matters too: patrol vehicles, maintenance crews and ground equipment move around the airfield, and a cellular network hands them from one antenna to the next without dropping the connection.
The pairing of edge computing with cameras is the part we would watch. Denver’s alert competed with deer on the same screen, and software that can tell a person from an animal at the fence line, on site and in seconds, is exactly the kind of job a private network with local computing exists to carry.
The Spectrum Question
Neither the airport nor Boldyn has said which radio spectrum the network will use. In the US, most private networks run on CBRS, a band the government opened for shared use, where users have deployed more than 430,000 devices across over 80 percent of counties, according to a Technology Policy Institute panel in February.
That band’s future is less settled than its users would like. A 2025 law restored the FCC’s power to auction spectrum and set a target pipeline for commercial use, and industry groups have warned that the government could repurpose parts of CBRS for auction. Any airport building on shared spectrum should know what happens to its network if the rules change.
Who Boldyn Is
Boldyn has built its business on running networks in places carriers struggle to serve on their own. It is building mobile coverage in New York’s subway, holds a 20-year concession to install small cells on London’s transport fibre, and runs a private 5G network with Nokia equipment at the port of Las Palmas in Spain’s Canary Islands, where it links cranes without laying cable.
An airport sits naturally alongside those projects: a large site with its own security needs, heavy data from cameras and vehicles, and an operator that wants control rather than a shared public signal. “By managing this network through our dedicated NOC and SOC, we are delivering a scalable platform that supports immediate security requirements,” said Jason Caliento, Boldyn’s chief commercial officer in the US.
An Airport Growing Into It
Ontario’s reasons are also about growth, since the airport, which serves the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, now handles more than seven million passengers a year, has been Southern California’s fastest-growing airport over the past decade, and is a major cargo hub. J.D. Power this year ranked it the second most popular medium-sized airport in North America.
“Modernizing our communication infrastructure ensures that as our passenger volumes continue to climb, our ability to monitor, respond, and manage airfield security remains ahead of the curve,” Miwa said. The same network could later carry baggage tracking or vehicle data, the kind of shift we explored in how physical AI changes IoT.
Why The Fence Matters More Than The Network
Neither the airport nor Boldyn has disclosed the contract’s value or length, and for a medium-sized airport a dedicated network is a real commitment. What justifies it is not the 5G label but the job it supports: giving security teams clear, fast video from every stretch of fence.
Denver showed what the stakes look like when that fails, with an alert, a confused camera view and two minutes to act. Ontario will judge its new network the same way, by how quickly the right alert reaches the right person when someone is on the wrong side of the fence, and other airports weighing private networks should use the same yardstick.
