5G is the fifth generation of mobile, cellular technologies, networks and solutions. It promises a major change in mobility and, although not just ‘built’ for the Internet of Things (IoT), it is heralded as a major driver of the growth of IoT, Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0.
It’s mainly in the scope of IoT trends for 2018 and beyond that we tackle 5G in this overview with a brief explainer and forecasts for the usage and role of 5G in IoT and its expected impact on mobility in evolving connected business realities.
When bridging digital and physical by leveraging IoT and cyber-physical systems and when striving towards ever more automation and autonomous decisions in environments such as the smart factory, autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, smart cities and connected industrial applications in IoT in manufacturing, to name a few, you do need quite some resources to deal with the resulting deluge of data that needs to be analyzed and gathered to begin with.
It’s why edge computing, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence become so important in IoT and why edge computing is certainly among the top ‘IoT evolutions’. In its Worldwide IoT Predictions 2018, announced in a November 1, 2017 webcast, IDC stated that by 2020, IT spend on IoT edge computing edge infrastructure will reach up to 18 percent of the total spend on IoT Infrastructure – and there is quite some infrastructure.
However, to enable a hyper-connected environment, leveraging IoT on a real-time and massive scale whereby there are so many variations in the context of IoT-enabled applications (some have moving parts, some have remotely located parts, some require fluctuating bandwidth, some need extreme reliability, the list goes on), ultimately many of the network technologies that we have today aren’t really fit for the future and even today we often need to use a mix of fixed and wireless network technologies to realize massive IoT projects, let alone the ultra-connectivity we are seeing in the next decade. Enter 5G.
The promise of 5G and massive IoT
Many of today’s IoT projects do fine with the low data rate solutions they require to function, along with the low costs explaining the success of non-cellular LPWAN technologies in several areas and of current cellular IoT solutions.
But what with mission-critical, performant and reliable connections in mass IoT applications of tomorrow and in some of the mentioned areas such as connected vehicles (moving parts) and the industrial processes of Industry 4.0 at scale or smart cities on the next level? The reach and capabilities of several existing LPWA network technologies are increasing and the possibilities of cellular solutions such as 4G LTE continue to be pushed but 5G is on the horizon to deal with those.
5G promises to bring the reliability, latency, scalability, security and ubiquitous mobility that would be needed for several mission-critical services in the IoT space and beyond.
Moreover, 5G promises to offer a new infrastructure and design with inherent capabilities that already offer several new services. And, last but not least, it promises to do so at a low costs, with high agility and at low energy consumption (with 5G new types of devices will come that are suited for low-power applications), making it a key component of the communications and connectivity layer of the IoT technology stack. It almost sounds too good to be true.
5G and IoT – industrial IoT and edgeless computing
While it indeed almost sounds to be good to be true the 5G race is on since a few years now in operator land and steps continue to be taken for massive deployment in the – rapidly approaching – next decade.
If you’re new to 5G, it’s important to know that there is no real 5G yet. Moreover, there are different visions with regards to the next generation of mobility. You also need to know that both in IoT and industrial IoT (IIoT) there is an evolution towards more wireless connectivity with LPWA(N) or low power wide area (networks) being the fastest grower in connectivity until 2021 in the Industrial IoT connections, which power the evolution of IIoT and Industry 4.0 as described in our article on IIoT communication and connectivity technology 2017.
5G is not just for industrial IoT, it stretches or will stretch much further and proponents say that it will massively change mobility as we know it today. Still, from an IoT perspective major support for the advancement of 5G happens within companies and associations that want to boost industrial transformation and the Industrial Internet or Industry 4.0.
The reasons: as enhanced mobile broadband, 5G aims to enable massive IoT, offering the network capacity and performance in myriad applications of IoT in the most diverse contexts: from those connected vehicles and other moving objects to the most bandwith-intensive applications in massive machine types of communications, remote surgery, the connection of billions and billions of IoT devices, the types of applications that need next-level experiences, the steering of robots and far more mundane applications with the benefit of one wireless network to enable it all and promising the mentioned reliability and so forth.
As a token of the industrial support for 5G a few examples. The OpenFog Consortium, which was launched by Cisco in the context of its fog computing approach and is mainly meant for data-intensive IoT applications where intelligence (analytics) is brought to the edge, aims to enable AI, IoT and 5G with fog computing and is a proponent of 5G.
Or take the Made Smarter Review, an impressive document that was released in October 2017 and should be the foundation of the UK’s industrial transformation strategy for smart manufacturing for years to come: it also foresees the pushing of R&D in several Industrial IoT connectivity areas of which 5G is one. We can go on: also in the rest of Europe (the EU action plan on 5G in the scope of its digital single market strategy), in the US and across the globe, associations aiming to give industrial IoT a boost are involved in the nascent so-called ‘5G era’.
It is not a coincidence we mentioned the OpenFog Consortium by the way. 5G also has an edgeless computing taste as devices become part of the network instead of endpoints in the sense we know them today. In other words: closer to people and, in the scope of IIoT, closer to machines such as robots and whatnot.
The future of 5G and IoT – and the future impact of 5G beyond IoT
Will 5G be the highly adaptable, scalable, reliable and redesigned next step in cellular IoT connectivity that is suited for our ever expanding need for connectivity?
Again, we aren’t there yet at all but knowing that 5G is an extension of the LTE and all LTE-Advanced networks yet at the same time it comes with an entirely new network architecture (with consequences for operators who need to leverage software-defined networking and network functions virtualization), which offers more than just the impressive data rates it offers (more below), that it also promises to build upon the investments that organizations have already made today and that it might be ubiquitous in 10-20 years from now, far beyond IoT, chance is real.
When gauging the willingness among end-user organizations to pay more for 5G, in the Summer of 2017 Gartner found that, according to the expectations of respondents 5G would play an important role in IoT in their organizations.
Although there was some confusion among respondents as to when 5G would be widely available (a large majority believed 2020) IoT communication surprisingly turned out to be the main use case for 5G (57 percent of respondents).
It was surprising for many reasons as depicted above: as research director Sylvain Fabre reminded, the number of connected IoT things needing cellular connectivity would not go beyond the capacities which are offered by current cellular IoT connectivity solutions in most areas across the globe before 2023.
Moreover, even when 5G is fully ready, he expects that just small portion of IoT use cases needs the high data rates and low latency as offered by 5G and, finally, he expects that it will take until 2020 before 5G can support the massive machine-type communications or highly reliable low-latency communications it promises.
At the same time the world doesn’t stop and a mix will always be needed as there is always something that needs a different approach or simply doesn’t need the capacities of 5G. The GSMA sees 5G as the center of a heterogeneous network environment with other connectivity solutions such as LPWA.
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