How do you write a story you can’t tell? When the real plot, outside of the corporate narrative, can’t be revealed? Normally, you sit on the bank and watch the river flow – until the water rises and the bodies float by. But what if this dastardly talk says that the levee’s burst? Well then, you rough it up and make it up, and you project – and tell a joke that would make you laugh, if it wasn’t so black. It goes like this: a mobile operator in pin-stripes, a radio engineer in a billowing jacket, and a software startup in a fitted suit walk into a rust-belt dive-bar and lay their money down.
Except this is not the whole scene. The operator is nervous, and steps back; a venture firm in slacks picks up the tab for his squeeze. There are chancers along the bar and ‘industrialists’ in the back, with sleeves rolled up and pool cues in their hands. Gamblers in lounge suits lean over the balcony, and regulars in plaid shirts hunch forward in their seats. In this long saloon bar, snaking through the halls of MWC last week, one thing is clear: there will be blood. It’s a stand-off and a stitch-up. Fade to red.
MWC was electric; the mood in the private 5G camp was febrile. Something is about to give. It was in the air – not on the stages or the stands, but in the busy back rooms; in briefings and counter-briefings, over half-eaten sandwiches and half-written deals. It was carried on coffee breath, and revealed in furrowed brows. Everyone looked desperate – except maybe the boys from the county hell (at the George Payne on Wednesday night). And what did they all say? What was the best story out of MWC, which might be gleaned from the hush-hush and the hear-say?
It was that private 5G is a busted flush right now for lots of firms; like the final card, the one that pays out, is the wrong suit. Or that the card is right, and the payout is wrong. Because the hype said otherwise. Just like in IoT (and every-thing). It was like the penny dropped at MWC, and the new prospectors in IoT-town started behaving strangely. Bang, bang, bang, the story went: this vendor is dead (or will be); that vendor is dead (or should be); their gear is whack, their targets are missed, their jobs are gone; jeopardy, skulduggery, and broken dreams everywhere you look.
It was like an old country song – tragic and hilarious at the same time. Because who in their right minds is still in this digital-change game – in the complex business of industrial revolution and the complicated sale of industrial IoT – for easy money? How long did the last industrial revolution take? Even if this one is amped-up on AI, how long will the paranoid control-freaks of industry take to upgrade billion-pound production systems? Twenty years of instrumenting the world, and where is the money in IoT? Just look in their faces; disgruntled to be down in the weeds, and not lying in clover.
We’ve been writing in these pages like the IoT market has it sussed, and probably it does – but only because it accepts, generally, that it takes loads of time and loads of work. Which is why the high rollers have mostly bailed; and why events like IoT Stars last Monday night in Barcelona sound like an echo chamber for minor engineering victories – when the world is on fire. The lesson from low-power IoT for high-power IoT (private 5G) is that you might solve a problem for the customer (and the planet), but that nothing is easy – and the spoils are shared.
It is a team sport and a speculative pursuit; which is why the absence of talk at MWC about ‘priming’ 5G supplies into Industry 4.0 shows progress. But there isn’t a pot of gold. Industrial IoT is a basket case, by its nature – the idea to plug common telemetry into every system in every enterprise in every industry. So maybe the high-stakes venture schmucks in private 5G should get their coats and quit the scene – just like they’ve quit IoT. Except of course, 5G is different – as a globally standardised cellular-based technology being made into a cloud-friendly IT technology. 5G is anyone’s game, suddenly.
For developers, and therefore for consumers and enterprises, it is just another internet pipe, albeit one with high-fidelity wireless mobility features – which, when married with distributed and optimised compute resources, will bring opportunities to deliver unique services. Which will drive new digital change of all sorts. This is the bigger industry narrative at MWC, of course – as it always is. But small-scale private-versions of 5G networks offer a testbed for many of these new advances, as well as for a new economy of enterprise applications.
So then, money and power – in the cellular industry, but also and increasingly in adjacent big-ticket tech sectors – mark-out 5G as the IoT alumnus most likely to succeed. But there is a geopolitical capitalist stitch-up, too. Because even as the levee breaks and the bodies float by, on a gusty swell of market hype (and also desperate parenting, sharp practice, bad luck), there are moves in the background by America Inc. to nationalise 5G supply lines into critical industries at home, and to monopolise them abroad as well.
Which is why HPE will probably buy this company, and Dell will buy that one; and why the California boys’ club – in cahoots at an imaginary saloon bar in a blue-collar town, and mob-handed at champagne receptions on Barcelona rooftops – will provide the main competition. And the Europeans, which navigated this frontier town, will be nowhere, either co-opted into this american fiction, or else occupied with baggy-suited 5G sales for double-breasted 5G services (which may yet find their mark for better-effort wide-area enterprise comms).
But in the end, in this western fling, the sharpest dressers will probably be the sharpest shooters.
