Understanding 5G’s Impact on Industries
December 23, 2019
- Author: Steve Koenig, CTA Vice President, Market Research
November/December 2019
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5G is the first wireless generation led by the enterprise and will eventually overlay the entire global economy. Understanding how 5G will intersect with industrial sectors is vitally important. New research from CTA analyzes this dynamic and explores how 5G will touch key industrial sectors of the economy, impacting their processes and offerings.
CTA’s 5G: Impact on Industries (August 2019) report details 5G’s capabilities and explains why they matter to enterprise. There are four broad use case areas for 5G, including: enhanced broadband (either mobile or fixed-wireless), low latency (AR/VR applications), massive IoT (manufacturing, smart cities), and critical IoT (self-driving cars, remote health care).
To compete in the next decade, industries must understand these capabilities in the context of their business processes, market opportunities, competitive dynamics, and their own product and service roadmaps. For example, what new applications are possible with a 5G toolkit? Which current applications and services can benefit from 5G’s higher throughput and lower latency? Who are new potential partners?
Network Slicing
A key enterprise feature of 5G is private networks dedicated to the needs of the business by offering guaranteed coverage and capacity. While private cellular networks are not entirely new, the report describes how 5G enables new use cases where high-throughput and low latency are critical, such as cloud-based robotics or an automated manufacturing plant. While some of this capability exists in 4G (through massive-MIMO and carrier aggregation), 5G provides “more seamless implementation on the cellular bands.” This is accomplished by network slicing.
Network slicing for private 5G networks empowers enterprise with an “elastic” cellular network that shapes to requirements on demand. Essentially, network slicing allows a private network to be sectioned to perform different functions across verticals, enterprises and application types. Each slice can have different capabilities, requirements and KPIs. This flexible network reduces cost while ensuring consistent treatment of various application data across the network — even as requirements change in real time. Therefore, the key benefit of network slicing is optimization, not only in terms of network performance but also the business model.
The main spectrum earmarked for this exciting technology is Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) operating in the 3.5 GHz band and is slated by the FCC to be auctioned off in June 2020. Handset manufacturers are eager to leverage these private networks as well. Both Samsung’s Galaxy S10 and Apple’s iPhone 11 offer support for CBRS.
Edge Computing
Edge computing is another feature of 5G that is highly relevant to the enterprise and represents a return to a distributed computing platform. Cloud (centralized) computing has helped us make sense of a rising tide of data, but as data generation continues to climb, more will need to be processed at the edge or device level. This is especially true for enterprise applications.
For example, connected sensors along a manufacturers’ assembly line will generate huge amounts of data that need to be assessed in a distributed fashion in concert with the cloud. Edge computing allows the network, data and intelligence resources to be available on demand where they are needed most
Soon, sensors at the edge will become the “eyes and ears” of enterprise. This is called “Industrial IoT” and represents the enormous network capacity of 5G. Industrial IoT will generate massive amounts of data that will be instrumental in creating new value.
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