A new summary report / blog from UK5G, the government-backed innovation network dedicated to industrial 5G in the UK, makes for good reading. It concludes, ultimately, that industrial 5G is the same as industrial IoT – that it is a discipline that is massive in its general scope and miniature (relatively) in its individual application. In other words, UK5G concludes, after work with 1,250-odd partners on 100-plus 5G testbeds over five years, that the market for industrial 5G is intensely fragmented, and cannot be neatly simplified or scaled to suit big-ticket service providers.
Because, again, industrial 5G is the same as industrial IoT, which has known this for some years already; and industrial IoT is only a loose description for a sensor-based networking that has potential usage for many enterprise ‘verticals’. In other words, industrial 5G is not a technology market, at all, but a broad and diverse user market – or a tech market that must morph and stretch to reflect every user market. Or an “enabling technology”, to use the tech vernacular. It is just a business tool, is the point – whose relevance and application changes in different hands.
Which makes it hard to rationalise, and hard to grasp, and hard to ‘own’ – especially if you are used to selling one product, essentially, to millions. Indeed, what is notable about the UK5G summary is the conclusion that this user ‘market’ – the UK’s industrial economy, nominally; deploying private 5G networks, commonly – has struggled to hold the attention of mobile operators. “Engagement with operators on private network[s] has been welcomed across the programme,” writes Peter Whale, senior advisor at UK5G, reflecting on the whole 5G Testbeds and Trials (5GTT) experiment, funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to the tune of £200 million.
He goes on: “However, from a commercialisation perspective there are significant challenges in working with mobile operators, owing to the cost models [they] operate within and their need to recoup investments, limiting their interest in supporting vertical markets that are perceived as niche.” It is an explosive statement, potentially, which suggests operators are prioritising their private 5G pursuits, to focus on a few verticals, or else struggling with the business case and tending to step back, possibly to outsource to third parties – in line with new tactics in the broad IoT space.
This message about operator fatigue, when faced with the hard graft and low volumes of IoT, goes under the header of ‘commercial sustainability’ in the UK5G writeup, where Whale discusses the need for (and lack of) “stackable use-cases” to make 5G scale as a networking component in a broader change package for enterprises – in the kind of volume that will keep national operators, with expensive spectrum assets, interested. Here, “stackable use cases” actually means transferable IoT apps, which will cascade across sectors and swing the case for private 5G networks.
But the point about how to explode the IoT model – to make new business work for old businesses, so the case for thousands of networks for thousands of customers looks, in terms of risk and reward, like the case for one network for millions of customers – is the same for the rest of the supply market, as well. Whale writes: “The supply chain is built around the premise of high-volume supply, and the economies of scale that come with that in terms of pricing… [so] it is [un]surprising that asking for 100 or 1,000 devices… will not be a top priority for your suppliers.”
He adds: “It may be slightly easier if you are after a standard off-the-shelf product, but asking for something currently still very forward-looking – for example, standalone operation on n77 spectrum, supporting voice inter-working with other network operators – is extremely challenging.” The story is the same, going from network provision, to hardware supply, to solution design; “solutions have to be constructed [by] putting together various building blocks”, writes Whale. “There are no easy off-the-shelf solutions,” he adds.
Again, and as we have written in these pages many times: cellular 5G technology – whose major differential value is with enterprises – has an inescapable problem to scale for enterprises. At least when the terms of its scale are dictated by the codes and constraints of the traditional telecoms industry. Reading between the lines, the message from the UK5G review is that these rigid old structures do not fit with this brave new world – of private 5G, industrial IoT, smart analytics, edge innovation, and digital change. The IoT market knows this better, already.
But this exercise also does the UK5G findings a disservice, perhaps; it is not just about big operators and small projects. There is plenty in Whale’s explanation that is hopeful, and useful. The UK’s 5GTT programme has revealed certain other lessons, which should be written down, memorialised, applied – that, ultimately, teamwork makes the dream work, as John Maxwell wrote, and every marketing agency in the land recites; plus other teachings. But we are out of time, with a story to file and a newsletter to send. We will follow up with 10 lessons from the UK5G adventure later this week.
