Summary Bullets:
• The mobile industry is increasingly developing 5G use cases to support critical operations in heavy industries like construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing.
• Despite advances in 5G solutions, many industrial customers still prefer to use legacy systems for critical workloads like voice and location, citing simplicity and reliability and concerns around security of IP networks.
The mobile industry continues to promote 5G as the wireless generation built for the enterprise. As 5G rollouts progress across the globe, operator initiatives continue to focus on ways the technology can be applied to enterprise use cases. One common area operators are trying to develop is the use of 5G in heavy industry like construction, mining, manufacturing, and oil and gas. These industries often require workers to be in dangerous environments and require constant communication between workers and equipment, including traffic that spans voice, location data, machine telemetry, and environmental sensors. Operators like Orange, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telstra, AT&T, and China Mobile are at various stages of working with enterprises in verticals like healthcare, energy, mining, construction, manufacturing and government to develop ways to deploy 5G networks into their critical operations. The low latency and high bandwidth nature of the technology allows for real-time collection and processing of large amounts of data that can be used to enable remote operations, automation, enhanced security and a myriad other use cases.
