What does 5G mean for IoT? The IMC IoT M2M Council view

Recently I spoke on an IoT M2M Council webinar alongside Raphaël Glatt, Head of Signalling & Roaming Platforms at BICS and Scott Nelson, Vice President of Product at Digi International.

We had a great discussion around 5G, IoT and the impact that this combination of technologies will have on the way we do business in future.

You can listen to the conversation in full using the link at the bottom of the page, but here are a few of the key highlights we discussed:

The road to connected everything

The introduction of 5G is set to take IoT from a data centric service to a control centric service.

This means that the ever growing volume of data being produced by IoT devices will increasingly inform decision making, driving efficiencies across operations and industries.

The unique combination of high bandwidth, low latency and quality control will enable organizations to do more with their resources, putting mobile operators at the heart of this new age of industry.

We can expect 5G to be the catalyst for the Internet of Things in the same way that 4G characterized the widespread adoption of smartphones; driven by increasing capacity and the huge potential that intelligent data analytics offers.

Cars, for example, are already becoming more than just a vehicle that gets us from point A to point B. 5G will create new opportunities to collect and compute all sorts of vehicle data in real time, as well as exchange that information with other devices on the journey.

This could soon mean driving to your next destination knowing that traffic lights will synchronize to that exact route, at the exact time, notifying the car park and entrance barrier of your arrival to the second.

Vodafone Business partnerships already span over two thirds of major car manufacturers in Europe and we are working together to make great strides with this new technology.

With the automotive design process initiated 5-6 years in advance, client collaboration is ongoing to define how 5G will shape the future of the automotive sector.

New heights of business efficiency

As well as travel on land, we will also see 5G enabled drone applications allow businesses to expand their operations to the skies.

Since commencing with trials last year, Vodafone Business has been working to create safer airspaces in the future through the use of effective drone traffic control centers (DTCC).

This is because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that the number of commercial drones in the U.S. will reach almost three million by 2020 - quadruple the number in 2016.

We know 5G, combined with IoT, will build on today’s capabilities and keep growing. We saw a perfect example recently with the 5G controlled unmanned aircraft with Airbus.

Examples such as this prove that 5G will be an evolution, not a sudden revolution, gradually transforming society over time.

This is the reason that tech savvy businesses today are making decisions with tomorrow’s capabilities in mind.