The broad internet-of-things (IoT) market will drive demand for reduced-capability 5G, and even-more reduced-capability 5G (enhanced RedCap; eRedCap) technology to the tune of almost a billion connections by 2030, says analyst house Omdia. The total will surge upwards at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66 percent in the period, it reckons, to reach 963.5 million connections by 2030.
Omdia has a new report about the “growing influence of 5G technology on IoT”, which says the “gradual phase-out” of LTE (4G) over the next decade will see a migration of IoT applications onto 5G networks, with LTE-based Cat-1 to Cat-4 IoT giving way to RedCap and eRedCap in particular. “Companies across various sectors are beginning to deploy this technology, anticipating its wide-scale adoption in the coming years,” it writes.
Omdia has been bullish on RedCap for years, going so far as to call it the ”big missing piece of the 5G IoT puzzle”. By contrast with its billion forecast, ABI Research said last month that total shipments of RedCap-based IoT modules, which it positions to offer 5G-based alternatives to mid-range 4G-level LTE Cat-4 and LTE Cat-6 units, will top 80 million over the next five years, in the period to 2029. Which is a much lower forecast.
The ABI figure is for total shipments of IoT devices in 2029, and reads more like an annual figure, rather than for the total number of connections across all (IoT and non-IoT) applications. But even so, the delta seems big. Of interest, ABI also says eRedCap IoT modules, representing a second offspring of the RedCap standard, offering 5G alternatives to lower-range LTE-Cat-1 and Cat-1bis, will account for 70-odd percent of total RedCap shipments in the period.
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As context, Release 17 of the 5G NR standard included provision for IoT sensors to connect to 5G with significantly reduced network – and therefore hardware, and therefore cost-linked – capabilities. This RedCap specification, previously ‘NR-Light’, sits provisionally between low-power IoT (mMTC) and standard-performance broadband (eMBB) in the 5G NR power hierarchy – and two rungs below elite-level critical comms (URLLC) performance (see image).
Release 18 introduces eRedCap to offer further reduced capabilities and lower data rate requirements, which puts it in range of low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT applications, as captured in LTE by the mMTC-style twins, NB-IoT and LTE-M. Omdia predicts RedCap will follow the path of RedCap – but “with a slight delay of a year or two, helping bridge the gap as industries transition from 4G to 5G technologies”, it says.
Omdia outlines progress with the rollout of standalone 5G (5G SA) around the world in the report, and flags its significance for “large numbers of IoT connections”. It has a list of the top 10 5G-based IoT use cases in the report, it says. It also discusses 5G network monetisation through API, as well as via the sale of private networks to enterprises. “One key differentiator [with] 5G is the wealth of innovative use cases it has enabled since its launch in 2019.
Alexander Thompson, senior analyst for IoT at Omdia, said: “5G RedCap was specifically designed for IoT applications, and in just a year since the first module launches, we’ve already seen small-scale deployments and trials begin to take shape. We expect 5G eRedCap to follow a similar path addressing use cases that demand reduced complexity and lower performance thresholds.”