Is private 5G/6G important after all?

Private 5G has always had a dedicated but small following in a few verticals, but for the average enterprise the whole topic is a yawn for good reason— they’re very unlikely to need it. The fact that 6G may improve on it when it (eventually) comes along is a bit like embellishing a party story that has already put your friends to sleep. But conditions are changing. What I’m now hearing suggests that the future of IT and enterprise networking may be written in these technologies, so you need to hear why that is, and you need to hear about the two drivers of what could be a major, critical, change. The first is process automation. I’ve said for years that the next big thing in enterprise IT is real-world, real-time applications. The total benefit pool enterprises could draw on in this space is as large as the one that’s funded all our IT since the 1950s, but this sort of thing is a long way from processing transactions and printing reports. Enterprises aren’t going to jump right into the deep end, no matter how much benefit could be on the table. They will ease into it, from somewhere close, and that somewhere is process automation. We do real-time process control and edge computing already. Environments such as factories, warehouses, refineries, and power stations are already using computer/network tools to automate operations. IoT connections deliver events and commands, and a local and specialized computer system supplies the control intelligence. All this happens, usually, within a single facility. The first logical step in raking in all that real-time money is to grow these applications out, and that’s where private 5G/6G comes in. Most process control is done using wired connections to local computers, or Wi-Fi. Wires can’t connect moving things, and they’re hard to maintain if they have to be strung a significant distance. Wi-Fi is great for a hundred feet from a hub, but it’s weak for large areas unless you install a lot of hubs and have a good roaming strategy. It also has both security and QoS concerns. But private wireless got started in these same applications even before 5G, and it’s gotten even more support since. Today, more enterprises believe that private 6G will impact their business than that public 6G services will. That’s because they see their next steps in process automation just expanding on what “local” means. Private wireless offers a way to connect fixed and mobile things over a larger distance, with better reliability and security. So, almost a third of big process automation users are either already using or testing private wireless, with most committed to 5G. And the preferred model looks a lot like fixed wireless access, FWA. Stick a big antenna up, and you can push out reliable broadband to fixed locations for a mile or even a bit more. You can connect moving stations like trucks, forklifts, and so forth as well. You can support, with a private network, the wires of the past and the mobile connections of IoT’s immediate future, facility-oriented networking. Running IoT telemetry through private 5G/6G has a potentially significant advantage in security and latency. And, once you’re committed to private 5G/6G connectivity, it’s easy to integrate with public wireless services that can still offer most of the benefits, like security via network slicing and latency management. While this doesn’t guarantee real-time-suitable latency over continental scope, most real-time applications are fundamentally local in nature. Why would a single control mechanism have to direct a truck leaving Los Angeles for a warehouse in New York City? But two in the same city is reasonable to coordinate things like just-in-time (JIT) delivery of product components to a factory. The second driver is the roving tech. Utilities and refineries are already spread out, and they’re supported by technical specialists who have to manipulate, and often repair, critical pieces of infrastructure. Many of these companies already equip their technicians with laptops, tablets, or smartphones loaded with details on the plant. Our 5G-FWA-evolving-to-6G model can empower these devices with high-speed broadband connectivity, enough so that they can view or generate high-def video, and with low enough latency that they can control real-time systems they’re working with or working on. A single tower could support most sites, and two could surely cover even the largest. Not to mention supporting the real-time process control activities I’ve already covered. These two application sets are also the key to industrial AI, which could be why Nvidia and Dassault Systems announced a partnership aimed at creating a platform to encourage broad development in the space. They form the bridge from today’s office-centric automation, through distributed process automation, and into applications where you’re empowering technical workers, which is a stepping-stone to empowering a broader group of workers, and even consumers. The applications aren’t just a bridge, they’re a debit card that unlocks the biggest new benefit case we know of in all of tech, one worth not millions but billions, even tens or hundreds of billions. They define the future of tech, and likely of all of us who use it. Watch development here, and watch it closely.