Sooner or later, it all comes down to money – and there just aren’t that many clear-cut use cases to bankroll a private 5G deployment. That is the consensus. Yes, industrial AR for remote assistance, reliable mobility for AGVs and AMRs, and, most convincingly, coverage of large outdoor industrial sites are neat applications, which might – with extensive testing – just about swing the case to deploy a private 5G network. But, at least while density is limited, LTE also works for lots of these use cases.
In the end, so much of 5G is still in the offing; it is an iterative technology, coming available on a 12/18-month release schedule. Right now, all we have is Release 15 networks and devices, which offer a form of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) that is not so different from being a go-faster LTE system. Which begs the question: why should an enterprise invest in an expensive 5G system, when a mass-market LTE solution works well enough (and familiar Wi-Fi presents options, too)?
And in the end, however good it gets, 5G has to be more affordable for the industrial heartlands, as well as high streets and office blocks, to seize on it as a no-brainer platform for their digital-change efforts. Which is why reduced-capability 5G – standardised in Release 17, frozen in June last year, set for standard issue in new and upgraded 5G systems at the end of 2024 – is so important, and can’t come soon enough. The private 5G community needs a fillip, and RedCap is it.
The hope is only that it is not too late.
Release 17 of the 5G New Radio (NR) standard, frozen in June last year (2022), which promises simpler 5G hardware and cheaper 5G costs. Provisionally, RedCap sits between eMBB and massive machine-type comms (mMTC) in the 5G NR power hierarchy; it sits two rungs below ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) 5G, which affords the headiest view of IoT comms in this 3GPP ladder – more commonly presented as three points in a 5G NR family triangle.
Until now, the thing about these three-pointed specification-types, which RedCap seeks to make into a venn diagram, is that only two are 5G-native. The twin low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies underpinning the mMTC concept are both LTE-based, albeit compatible with 5G NR radios – and subject to ongoing 3GPP support, as going-concerns for unique IoT cases. Ultra low-power NB-IoT and 2G/3G-like LTE-M, offer support for stripped-back, dirt-cheap, long-life, mega-scale IoT.
So as it stands, and for 12 months yet, cellular IoT needs LTE to make a fist of traditional IoT, at all – and it has a fight on its hands with well-entrenched non-cellular standards like LoRaWAN in unlicensed bands. But RedCap presents a commercial pathway in 2024 for LTE-based mMTC to migrate onto single 5G-based networks. In terms of capabilities, RedCap is supposed to plug a gap between eMBB and existing LTE-based mMTC, a couple of levels below high-fidelity URLLC.
Leo Gergs, principal analyst at ABI Research, outlines likely RedCap-for-IoT applications: “We’re talking wearables, sensors, video surveillance,” he says. But the crucial impact of RedCap, maintains Gergs, will be on the affordability of private 5G systems. Existing mMTC cases are served by a mishmash of much cheaper non-cellular BLE, Wi-Fi, and LoRaWAN technologies, plus LTE-based NB-IoT and LTE-M. Which is why the telecoms market so desperately needs RedCap to come quickly.
Gergs explains: “5G has to compete with a lot of IoT tech, mainly on price. As an umbrella solution for lots of different use cases, 5G is not there yet for IoT for mobility and positioning, for example – linked with this bottleneck in the release schedule. Which is why all hopes are pinned on RedCap… The expectation is that reducing 5G capabilities down to an eMBB technology, essentially… will also bring down the price. And the price has to come down.”
He suggests private 5G hardware should come in-range of industrial Wi-Fi, to even get a look-in. “It has to come down to at least twice the price of industrial Wi-Fi at the moment. Which would be a considerable reduction, but a significant cost centre still,” he says. Analyst house Omdia says the same. It calls RedCap the ”big missing piece of the 5G IoT puzzle”, and suggests LTE-M-level pricing for 5G IoT gadetry is just the ticket for the cellular industry to make a sustained go of massive-scale sensor networks.
It notes a 10-time (1,000 percent) delta between LTE-M and eMBB module costs, as it stands, going from $30 to $300 per unit, respectively; there is no NR-provision, until now, for such “mid-speed (IoT) applications”, it says. “The price gap between 4G and 5G modules is one of the essential factors – if not the most crucial factor – that will continue to limit 5G adoption in IoT applications… Without RedCap, 5G NR is missing a key technology piece for IoT.”
