More Collaboration is Required to Move 5G IoT from Hype to Reality

M. Rogers

Summary Bullets:

• 5G will not be about consumers, devices, and video but rather about enterprises, connected things, and platforms; however the industry is still in a hype phase.

• In order to move hype to reality, operators, vendors, and industry need to collaborate around solutions and virtualize 5G networks, open them up to APIs and co-develop from the ground up.

From people to things

From attending 5G Asia last week, which was held at the Marina Bay Sands Expo Centre in Singapore, it is clear that 5G will mean something very different to the world than 4G LTE. The defining attributes of the LTE era is bringing mobile video to the masses and bringing many online for the first time. While 4G was about mass market consumer access to videos and applications from anywhere, 5G will be more about enterprises and governments transforming how we live and work. This also means 5G will be about connected things, machines, buildings, and cities, rather than connecting people with smartphones. 5G will also be about the power of analytics driven insights and automation.

5G has not quite arrived

Listening to speakers from across the technology industry from telcos to vendors to integrators to government agencies to independent software suppliers, it was clear that 5G will be all those things, but it also became abundantly clear that today 5G is not there yet. The telco and technology industries have a lot of work to do before the potential of 5G can really be unlocked. Outside of a handful of MNOs in US, South Korea, Australia, and EMEA, there are very few networks live today and coverage is very limited. Further, what is being offered so far are simply handset plans, not the society-changer that some have billed 5G as. Much of the buzz around early launches is really just hype, and current 5G services are simply a slightly faster LTE.