Popular

i3 | October 15, 2021

Getting Down to 5G Business

by 
Gary Arlen

From tracking professional basketball shooting techniques to managing 3D printers in factories to customizing

farm field nutrients , 5G is finding its way into countless industrial applications.

Sure, you’ve heard about the capabilities for fifth generation (5G) wireless technology in self-driving vehicles and for smart city management. And you have heard claims about faster/clearer 5G mobile phone service. But attention is now on Standalone Non-Public Networks (SNPNs), “network slicing,” Internet of Things (IoT) ventures and countless business services throughout the digital economy. Analysts contend that 5G innovation will be led by enterprise projects, not by consumer services.

Of course, the technology comes first. “5G can support three primary types of connected services,” says Joe Glynn, vice president of business development at chip-maker Qualcomm. He explains, “enhanced mobile broadband” for faster smartphones will be capable of new immersive experiences like extended reality and adds “low latency” systems for “remote control of critical infrastructure, vehicles and industrial equipment.” Glynn, who chairs CTA’s Wireless Division Board, focuses his outlook for 5G innovation on massive IoT projects that seamlessly connect virtually everything from smart home devices to smart cities.

Ami Silverman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Consumer Channel Sales and Marketing, also sees 5G’s major value in the enterprise “by effectively delivering more compute resources more quickly to the edge of the network and driving a new class of devices powered by 5G.”

“5G will enable customers to set up networks in their commercial space — on a construction site, at a refinery or a hospital — that are virtualized network slices with their own performance parameters,” Silverman says. “Think of automated high-precision asset localization, tracking and positioning in manufacturing. 5G opens new frontiers with enhanced mobile broadband up to 10 times faster, reliable low-latency communication, and very high device density up to one million devices per square kilometer,” Silverman explains.

This bandwidth and reliability will help create smart buildings, factories and agriculture. “Whereas previous generations of wireless devices were primarily mobile devices like smartphones, watches and tablets, 5G is a true leap forward in terms of connectivity capabilities.” Silverman cites 5G’s support for a larger variety and volume of devices as a critical value. “This will provide a significant opportunity for edge devices in the digital feedback loop to take advantage of processing high volumes of data at much faster speeds.”

Economic studies by Accenture commissioned by Qualcomm, predict 5G will generate up to $1.5 trillion in additional U.S. GDP between 2021 and 2025, and will create or transform up to 16 million American jobs.
Joe Glynn, Qualcomm 

Andrew Albrecht of the AT&T Business Development 5G Center of Excellence emphasizes the value of 5G in “IoT-heavy industries” where it can implement or scale data intensive technologies in new ways. “Novel 5G features like network slicing will ultimately transform how industries think about and use 5G,” Albrecht explains. “We’ll continue to see increased use of 5G in the operation technology side of many businesses.” He cites video as a sensor, AR/VR, mobile robotics, location-based services and even industrial control communications.

Sally Lange, founder of Slang Consulting in Chicago and a former CTA Executive Board member while at Sprint, categorizes the emerging 5G opportunity parade into four themes: efficiency, avoidance, connectivity and safety. Lange believes those features are interwoven, such as predictive intelligence (avoidance) and safety. Some of the 5G services may be geared to specific categories, and she’s enthusiastic about “new things that can be connected” via 5G wireless technology such as the “retailization of health care” for remote diagnostics and monitoring.

Connectivity at the Core

“5G will be the connectivity standard,” says Steve Koenig vice president, CTA market research. Although he expects smartphone voice and data services for consumers will be at the vanguard for residential 5G broadband, Koenig envisions “in five years we’ll have a robust landscape of industrial IoT applications across the economy powered by 5G in every conceivable economic sector.”

Koenig foresees massive 5G private networks for hospitals, campuses, factories and other institutional users. By 2027, he predicts revenues from business and institutional 5G customers will outstrip the consumer side. He also anticipates 5G will alter the amount of churn, which has been an expensive thorn in the wireless business. Koenig foresees “a myriad of connected sensors, displays, computing platforms: all kinds of things that are probably not connected with a wire.” Similarly, a factory “could have thousands of sensors on its production lines, monitoring processes in real time, which would also boost safety,” Koenig adds. He also expects autonomous equipment in the field, sensors in the soil measuring moisture nutrients and spectrographic analysis.

Qualcomm’s Glynn says, "Economic studies by Accenture commissioned by Qualcomm, predict 5G will generate up to $1.5 trillion in additional U.S. GDP between 2021 and 2025, and will create or transform up to 16 million American jobs." 

5G and cloud computing allow organizations to connect millions of endpoints, analyze data and deliver immersive experiences
5G and cloud computing allow organizations to connect millions of endpoints, analyze data and deliver immersive experiences Ami Silverman, Microsoft

5G for Industrial Users

Glynn says, “Trials of 5G industrial IoT are ongoing with applications such as connected robots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) with precise positioning, and we expect to see more employees with AR/VR headsets making use of 5G’s high data rates and low latency reliability,” he adds. “The factory of the future with Industry 4.0 is an opportunity for 5G to serve as an enabler of smarter manufacturing, as the factory presents a challenging radio environment with fast movement, large obstructions and demanding quality of service needs — scenarios that 5G was built for.”

Similarly, Lange sees 5G generating many changes in digital categories, such as e-commerce — what she calls “in-store experiences at home.” She adds, “We haven’t been able to replicate” the in-store experience, but she believes 5G will enable opportunities like pop-up stores. It is part of a larger transformation, fueled during the pandemic, in which consumers want “the tech to transact everywhere.” She contends this shift comes at a time when merchants are realizing they don’t need a year-round physical presence if they want to establish a seasonal store.

“This drives efficiency,” Lange adds. “5G lets people be more entrepreneurial.” Lange believes that 5G suppliers should focus on health care and the aging population. 5G can be vital in creating “a smart home for aging populations.” She says, “My hope is that this creates enterprise solutions for health, such as remote patient monitoring. She adds, insurance companies want to enable home health care, or as she puts it “the retailization of health care.”

Agreeing on the Unknown

Two things experts agree upon: 5G will be big, but they don’t know exactly how or where.

Lange is focused on 5G’s entrepreneurial opportunities. She says, “We are going to see a massive number of new companies and new industries,” adding that a new “ecosystem around them” will also develop.

Qualcomm’s Glynn summarizes, “Our engineers are working to double 5G’s downlink performance to 20 Gbps over the next several years. Qualcomm sees 5G as the unified connectivity fabric to wirelessly connect virtually everything around us. We are driving a rich roadmap of system innovations for the IoT expansion” by integrating 5G, AI and mobile “to reimagine how IoT technologies are implemented.”

Microsoft’s Silverman envisions new devices, acknowledging 5G technology will create “significant opportunity for edge devices in the digital feedback loop to take advantage of processing high volumes of data at much faster speeds.”

AT&T’s Albrecht says, “How this will be manifested is anyone’s guess but I’m excited about what the future brings. I doubt any of us could have anticipated the LTE applications that transformed how we’d live today, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see even greater connectedness in how we live, work and play.”

i3 magazine September/October 2021 cover

Subscribe to i3

I3, the flagship magazine from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®, focuses on innovation in technology, policy and business as well as the entrepreneurs, industry leaders and startups that grow the consumer technology industry. Subscriptions to i3 are available free to qualified participants in the consumer electronics industry. 

Subscribe