Leveraging 5G for vertically-focused IoT use cases is key
While its not yet standardized, 5G is most certainly the next big thing in telecom. The three primary use cases are enhanced mobile broadband, massive support for the internet of things and mission critical communications. Those last two speak to how 5G dovetails with the IoT to open up new vertically-focused services and applications that take advantage of ultra low latency and multi-gigabit per second throughput.
During Huawei’s Global Mobile Broadband Forum in London, BT CEO Gavin Patterson discussed the complexities of 5G, as well as the need for “the lowest cost deployment we possibly can, recognizing this is a pretty big infrastructure project in its own right,” according to a report from Mobile World Live.
“I talk to other CEOs around the world in this space, and we’ve all been struggling a little bit making the business case work. If you look from 3G to 4G, the case was underpinned by going from what was a pretty poor internet experience to one which was really opening up the potential of the internet to mobile. And we haven’t found that yet for 5G,” he said.
“Clearly the innovation is there, it’s coming to market quickly. But, ultimately, as carriers we’ve got to make a significant investment and put the capex down, and the business case still needs to be I think learnt, in many ways. But then it is opening up all the verticals around IoT which are going to open up new revenue streams. Finding the use cases I think is the biggest challenge we have at the moment.”
