Three sectors set to win big with 5G

1. Kickstarting IoT’s potential

An area with a lot to gain from 5G is the inter­net of things (IoT), net­works of sen­sors and soft­ware that can give almost any­thing the abil­i­ty to send and receive data. Indeed, IoT tech­nol­o­gy is becom­ing so wide­spread that any ben­e­fits for IoT trans­late into plus­es for prac­ti­cal­ly every oth­er indus­try.

There are obvi­ous appli­ca­tions in the con­sumer IoT device sec­tor. Prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, smart devices tap­ping into 5G infra­struc­ture will be more appeal­ing to the con­sumer because they can still turn the heat­ing on, for exam­ple, even if the wifi has crashed. The increased reli­a­bil­i­ty and speed of smart home gad­gets will be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant in the case of secu­ri­ty devices like cam­eras and locks. You want as fast a response as pos­si­ble when a sen­sor in your home has detect­ed an intrud­er or a fire.

There will be pos­si­bil­i­ties for IoT in the enter­tain­ment sec­tor as 5G’s abil­i­ty to trans­fer mas­sive amounts of data with such low laten­cy will enable ultra-immer­sive aug­ment­ed and vir­tu­al real­i­ty (AR/VR) and gam­ing expe­ri­ences. As all the actu­al pro­cess­ing pow­er can sit at a dis­tance with­out any detectable lag, uncom­fort­ably bulk head­sets will be a thing of the past.

A 5G net­work could sup­port more than two mil­lion con­nect­ed sen­sors per square mile

IoT can also make use of 5G’s net­work­ing slic­ing tech­nol­o­gy; once installed, 5G hard­ware can oper­ate mul­ti­ple vir­tu­al net­works on the same equip­ment. This means that a dis­tinct net­work could be used for secu­ri­ty-focused IoT devices so their uptime can be pri­ori­tised over less-essen­tial ser­vices.

Steve Szabo, vice pres­i­dent of IoT at Ver­i­zon Busi­ness, says: “The poten­tial of 5G to trans­form busi­ness oper­a­tions is immense, enabling use-cas­es that don’t exist today. As an exam­ple, a 5G net­work will poten­tial­ly be able to sup­port more than two mil­lion con­nect­ed sen­sors per square mile.”

In terms of the pos­si­bil­i­ties 5G will allow, he points to near real-time sim­u­la­tions, assess­ment, pre­dic­tion via arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and machine-learn­ing, and reme­di­a­tion as just a few of the appli­ca­tions that an inter­net of things with low-laten­cy trans­mis­sion will enable in all sorts of sec­tors, from smart homes to robot­ics to autonomous vehi­cles.

2. Smarter vehicles in smarter cities

A Gart­ner report last year pre­dict­ed that by 2023 more than half of installed IoT devices will be found in con­nect­ed vehi­cles, and 5G is going to be a key part of the sto­ry of how this is going to enable data and com­pu­ta­tion to trans­form the auto­mo­tive sec­tor.

Over the last few years, the Cel­lu­lar V2X (C‑V2X) com­mu­ni­ca­tions stan­dard has been devel­oped for trans­fer­ring data between a vehi­cle, oth­er vehi­cles on the road, near­by infra­struc­ture and devices, and the wider inter­net. While C‑V2X can oper­ate over 4G net­works, 5G is vast­ly more prefer­able due to the vol­ume of data that can be col­lect­ed, poten­tial­ly many ter­abytes an hour. The more data that can be gath­ered by the AI soft­ware that pow­ers autonomous dri­ving sys­tems, the bet­ter the deci­sions they will be able to make and the clos­er the much-vaunt­ed ful­ly autonomous vehi­cle becomes.

Even before we reach that point, there are plen­ty of semi-autonomous oper­a­tions that are made eas­i­er by a car that can com­mu­ni­cate and can be com­mu­ni­cat­ed with, such as park­ing, brak­ing or chang­ing lanes. Being able to gath­er real-time data from sur­round­ing cars and a wide range of near­by infor­ma­tion sources via a low laten­cy 5G con­nec­tion will both make it eas­i­er to avoid human error and increase the com­plex­i­ty of tasks that can be hand­ed over to autonomous sys­tems entire­ly.

[5G will] both make it eas­i­er to avoid human error and increase the com­plex­i­ty of tasks hand­ed over to autonomous sys­tems entire­ly

It will also have an impact on com­mer­cial auto­mo­tive oper­a­tions. An IoT-enabled fleet of trucks can feed­back all kinds of data about their routes and per­for­mance, enabling oper­a­tors to opti­mise oper­a­tions, not to men­tion all the poten­tial ben­e­fits of ful­ly fledged autonomous dri­ving.

There is one thing that might stop this tech­nol­o­gy from becom­ing an inte­gral part of dri­ving: infra­struc­ture. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor Ofcom’s Con­nect­ed Nations 2019 report esti­mat­ed that only 62 per cent of motor­ways (and only 46 per cent of B roads in the UK even had 4G cov­er­age from all oper­a­tors. With­out mas­sive improve­ment as we move into the 5G era, it’s hard to see how any new safe­ty fea­tures can be as tak­en for grant­ed as they would need to be.

But devel­op­ments in the auto­mo­tive indus­try could be a spur to improv­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty. As cities become con­nect­ed, with sen­sors and cam­eras mon­i­tor­ing every­thing from water pipes to traf­fic lights, increas­ing­ly smarter cars will be able to tap into all these sys­tems for live feed­back. This will enable them to make deci­sions on the fly, lead­ing to safer and more effi­cient jour­neys.

3. Manufacturing in the era of Industry 4.0

Man­u­fac­tur­ing is anoth­er sec­tor that will be rev­o­lu­tionised by 5G. At the most basic lev­el, wired net­works con­nect­ing machin­ery can run into the hun­dreds of dol­lars per metre of cable, so a wire­less net­work that pro­vides sim­i­lar reli­a­bil­i­ty and laten­cy has obvi­ous cost ben­e­fits, even after fac­tor­ing in retro­fitting old­er equip­ment with wire­less con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

The low­er laten­cy of 5G con­nec­tions opens up a whole range of pos­si­bil­i­ties. Since con­trol units can be triv­ial­ly placed any­where on, or even off, the floor in rela­tion to machin­ery, few­er of them may be need­ed and pro­duc­tion lines can become more cost effi­cient. Fur­ther effi­cien­cies might be iden­ti­fied by the appli­ca­tion of big data and ana­lyt­ics through 5G-enabled equip­ment.

There are also impli­ca­tions for the safe­ty of auto­mat­ed ele­ments of man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems, as improved com­mu­ni­ca­tion speed can help avoid acci­dents as dif­fer­ent sys­tems can update each oth­er near-instan­ta­neous­ly, with laten­cy as low as 1 mil­lisec­ond, com­pared to 25ms with 4G con­nec­tions, in case of an emer­gency.

In addi­tion, there are remote con­trol appli­ca­tions for this tech­nol­o­gy, like a joy­stick con­trol con­nect­ed to a robot­ic arm via a pro­to­type ver­sion of 5G as demon­strat­ed by Eric­s­son in 2016. The low laten­cy enables the per­son hold­ing the joy­stick to receive almost instan­ta­neous phys­i­cal feed­back on what the arm is doing, enabling far greater pre­ci­sion in move­ment.

Those that embrace 5G to get the right data to the right place at the right time will rapid­ly gain an edge on their com­peti­tors

The capa­bil­i­ty to rapid­ly trans­fer large amounts of data can work in tan­dem with the use of AI in man­u­fac­tur­ing. When using machine vision to detect flaws in com­po­nents, the faster you can get the data from the sen­sors to the machine actu­al­ly run­ning the algo­rithm that looks for defects, the more effi­cient your process will be.

The poten­tial improve­ments to AR/VR inter­faces that 5G unlocks can also be applied to man­u­fac­tur­ing. AR is already being used in fac­to­ries to speed up trou­bleshoot­ing process­es where instead of con­sult­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion to diag­nose a prob­lem, the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion can be super­im­posed over the actu­al com­po­nents you’re look­ing at.

Whether it’s by increas­ing the abil­i­ty and speed of auto­mat­ed sys­tems to run with­out human inter­ven­tion or by mak­ing human inter­ven­tion more effi­cient, man­u­fac­tur­ers that embrace the abil­i­ty of 5G to get the right data to the right place at the right time will rapid­ly gain an edge on their com­peti­tors.

---