Recently, from the Sensor Expo & Conference, a Qualcomm executive talked about what companies and cities are doing with regard to building their own 5G networks. The senior director of product management predicted that the sheer cost of 5G prohibits widespread use cases in IoT, though it could be viable for private networks in smart factories or smart cities. For instance, Nokia is already offering equipment that is designed to support a local 5G network. in the article that follows the author does an excellent job of providing more detail on the different options available for designing private 5G networks.
The rollout of 5G technology will have sweeping implications for the industrial IoT but won’t impact all IIoT applications in the near term, according to Gerardo Giaretta, senior director of product management and the head of Industry 4.0 at Qualcomm.
5G will offer enormous benefits in areas like smart factories but won’t immediately be a solution for applications that are relatively simple and require massive-scale deployment, such as smart meters and many farming and agricultural applications, he said in a keynote address at the Sensors Expo & Conference 2019 here Thursday.
Many of these applications will continue to rely on low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) derivations of LTE technology such as LTE Cat M and NB-IoT, which are more tailored to IIoT applications than general-purpose LTE and more well-suited for those use cases that don’t take advantage of the increases in bandwidth and speed offered by 5G, Giaretta told an audience of several hundred engineers.
