Currently considered the most advanced mobile broadband technology standard, 5G is expected to achieve 3-billion subscriptions by 2025 at a growth of 600-million subscriptions from 2023 to 2024.
One of the key markets influenced by the evolution of 5G is, of course, the Internet of Things (IoT), a market segment expected to grow to 49-million 5G IoT endpoints installed worldwide by 2023.
The two technologies offer the industry the perfect storm of speed, connectivity and control, transforming the potential of IoT and the capabilities of the technology that leverages IoT across industry and sector.
As Roger Hislop, executive member of the IoT Industry Council of South Africa (IOTIC), points out, 5G has the potential to be a massive catalyst for IoT as long as the hurdles limiting its uptake and its perceptions are overcome.
“There are plenty of benefits to 5G – higher bandwidth, better latency, more concurrent sessions, greater control of network resources – but how this will translate into the more flashy user benefits touted by the industry cheerleaders remains debatable,” he explains.
“Many of the use cases are speculative, even fanciful, right on the edge of severe over-hype. 5G is an evolution of existing mobile standards, not magic, and does need to overcome three clear disadvantages before it can achieve its full potential.”
These disadvantages are cost, power and range. A 5G network build is incredibly expensive, so the hype that is accompanying it is driven by companies wanting to recoup their investments or secure government support.
The base stations for 5G use more power than 3G and 4G so this adds to both the cost and complexity of rollout – current handsets eat battery power until radios can be optimised.
From a range perspective, operators will need to use higher carrier frequencies to achieve the promised performance as 5G will only perform to the levels promised well north of 3Ghz.
And, as frequency increases, penetration decreases so operators will have to invest in small-cell base stations every few hundred metres as opposed to one base station every 3-5kms.
“To see genuine, high-performance 5G benefits, there is going to have to be a tonne of civils built for a tonne of base stations for a very long time,” says Hislop. “The blistering, multi-gigabit, sub-millisecond latency trials used to promote 5G come from the lab, and will not be experienced in the real world.
“It’s also important to consider that 5G is a public, shared radio network and users are relying on third-party operators to keep them connected and secure — so there is still a strong case for private radio and especially higher speed, highly reliable fibre networks.”
While much of the promise behind 5G remains speculative, so are the industries that will supposedly benefit from it. Self-driving cars directed remotely are not going to be a reality any time soon. These kinds of use cases would rely on an infinitely pervasive, infinitely reliable mobile connection – stretching the bounds of likelihood.
The day-to-day benefits to most users is more mundane. Internet service providers (ISP) can use it to offer higher-performance fixed wireless services.
It is in the automation and instrumentation use cases, especially where you want to retrofit IoT capability with wireless devices, is where 5G will shine. However, only if mobile operators prioritise IoT-centric services over headline-grabbing sci-fi features.
“If it delivers as promised, 5G will be a massive catalyst for IoT,” he adds. “At its heart, IoT is small, low-power devices connected over a radio network to the cloud to provide organisations with real-world, real-time visibility into their people, processes and things.
“A reliable, low-cost radio network that’s pervasive over the entire country is key to 5G making a real impact on IoT. We already have networks like Sigfox and LoRaWAN, and old 2G technology still does the job, but their limitations are quite severe, so a new for-purpose connectivity option with pervasive national coverage would be invaluable.”
The evolution of Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT, part of the LTE standard) was supposed to provide higher bandwidth, real-time use cases in IoT, but it has only slowly delivered on its promise due to a slow and spotty rollout.
3G and 4G networks have issues with resource management – providing an acceptable quality of service to voice, data and video users – alongside low bandwidth but mission-critical IOT users.
Overall, 5G is designed to fix these problems, but the challenge is for mobile operators to change their business models to make their IoT-centric technologies more cost-competitive and to introduce IoT-friendly service offerings.
“Moving forward, mobile operators need to move away from their baked-into-their-DNA compulsion to burn their customers with costs like SIM fees and minimum billing increments, and to focus rather on growth and connectivity solutions that are cost inclusive and capable,” concludes Hislop.
“The IoT Industry Council actively encourages local mobile operators to cultivate IoT-centric services for 5G because the technology provides genuine use cases that deliver genuine value to the business and local government that far outstrips the glamourous hype of holographic videos and self-driving cars.”