Wider acceptance of private 5G will require expanding its uses among early adopters and finding suitable applications for it in other industries.
Last year, I blogged about private 5G and explained how you’d know you were a prospect for the technology as an alternative to WiFi or public cellular services. My focus was on the same community of workers that most tech empowerment has focused on, meaning the white-collar or “carpet” types. Since the first of the year, I’ve had a chance to chat with 31 companies who are using or deploying private wireless technology, and I’ve also chatted with some of their integrators and suppliers. None of the enterprises were using private 5G in the hallowed (carpeted) halls of an office. Instead, their targeted jobs were outside in the dirt—sometimes literally—or on some factory or warehouse floor.
My new insight isn’t a broad license to tout private 5G to the skies, or to rush out to grab your share. It turns out that of the roughly 1,200 private wireless buyers I can identify, almost all are in just six verticals. They are agriculture, energy, healthcare, industrial and manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing.
When is 5G better fit than Wi-Fi
IoT, meaning sensors and controllers, may or may not meet the mobility requirement I set in that past blog, but they do have something that’s almost equivalent, which is distributability. In all but one of the verticals, you’re likely to find a large physical space populated by a bunch of devices. The devices may measure or detect things, control things, and in short are fundamental to the operation of the facility. There may be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of them, and they have to operate out in the open, in all sorts of weather, with minimal care.
Distributability is the reason the value proposition for these verticals is broader than the one that drives office-worker empowerment. Generally, business technology is justified by productivity gains, and so it focuses on jobs with the highest unit value of labor. We see that in all our private 5G verticals, especially in energy and healthcare, but we also see opportunities to target masses of lower-labor-value workers. In an agricultural irrigation system that involves 10,000 valves and a larger number of sensors, 5G can save the time it would take a laborer to check and change each one, and that adds up to a big savings providing that costs can be managed.
Those remote devices, unlike smartphones, aren’t in the possession of people who can keep them charged up, and you can’t have people running around to change batteries. Thus, power consumption is really important. Wi-Fi is a power hog compared to 5G, and that alone can be a big problem for remote sensors and controllers. There’s also a range problem in most missions; Wi-Fi isn’t good for much more than a couple hundred feet, and in most of the applications these companies reported, there was no point from which all their devices could be reached using Wi-Fi. One user told me that they needed a mile range.
Why not public 5G, you might wonder? Well, think of a thousand little devices, each with their own cellular data plan. Forget a car, the operators would send an airplane for you if you had that kind of deal on the table, but nobody is going to spend that much on an IoT application. Private 5G could save (forgive the mixed metaphor) a boatload of cash, and in many cases a single private tower or two will cover a major facility.
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