“I don’t know why I should have to defend that, actually”, says Sander Rotmensen at Hannover Messe a couple of weeks back, still in position with Siemens at the time as the firm’s Mister 5G, responsible for stewarding its box-fresh private 5G system into the market. He is responding to a question, prompted by asides from various telco veterans on the show floor, that Siemens is late to the 5G game.
It is not, he says. Siemens’ strategy has been deliberate, from the start; its timing is right. It has kept to its word, he says, by preparing a self-made cellular system for a home debut in the summer, just as industrial users get serious about private 5G. Because the 5G narrative only really joins this Industry 4.0 tale, on the shop floor, from now; it is a 2023/24 plot twist, he suggests – everything that has gone before is a scribble and a draft.
He comments: “We haven’t been slow. Release 15 came out in December 2018. We were among the first with a 5G end-device, for public and private 5G. We said in 2019 we wouldn’t have a [network] product before 2023. Maybe we could have done something sooner, but it wouldn’t have been right. This solution, now, is good for the next couple decades. This is not a smartphone market; industry upgrades every 10-15 years.”
He adds: “There are customers waiting for us, yes. But they understand the need to wait – for us to do it the right way. We started from scratch, with a blue-sky development. We didn’t squeeze a big network into a little box. A countrywide network is great, but it is overkill for an enterprise. We selected the right features for the launch version, starting with an ID and changing it to cater to the needs of industry – at this phase of 5G.”
We should pause, briefly, and go back to the start. This is our last interview (the last, perhaps) with Industrie 4.0’s Mister 5G – at least insofar as Rotmensen might claim the title, shepherding a new 5G system for Europe’s largest manufacturing company, and because Hannover Messe, where the system is on show, is his curtain call. (Rotmensen switched to lead a hush-hush new cybersecurity detail in the days following the Hanover fair.)
But it is not the last, either; because RCR Wireless has been promised an exclusive on the new cybersecurity venture (in 2024!), likely to play into its developing industrial 5G proposition – and also because there is a new Munich-made Mister 5G in town. Sat across from Rotmensen, in a backroom in Hanover, away from the bustle of the Siemens stand, we meet Daniel Mai, the company’s new director of industrial wireless comms.
Mai explains: “I am taking the last leg, through the launch in the summer. It is exciting because the demand is there; customers are waiting. That is clear. But we will scale slowly – because it is a new technology. The whole ecosystem is a work-in-progress, at the moment. We have a joint approach, so customers learn how to use it – which services to take from a vendor, which to run themselves. And we will learn, also, to improve the system.”
To be continued…
