5G use cases: exploring 5G applications beyond telecom

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New 5G use cases

Who will these industries turn to for 5G services? Most likely, they will want to work with established CSPs. Industrial companies, 'smart city' governments, automakers, and others will likely prefer to outsource the management of 5G’s higher bandwidth and massive endpoint count. In other words, it’s a big revenue growth opportunity for CSPs.

At the same time, these new avenues of growth come with customers who will present unfamiliar requirements. Setting up a massive industrial IoT environment, for instance, promises to be different from the regular business of running a CSP. Each opportunity is uncharted territory that comes with unique challenges.

5G use case 1: industrial and robotics

Industrial companies want 5G to serve as the basis for an intelligent and secure edge platform, one that enables autonomous operations and distributed decision- making. One difficulty with this comes from vision-based systems, i.e., robots that can 'see'. They need low latency. Otherwise, the robot may not be able to react in time to visual inputs. Wind River has been active in this space for many years. We can help create a unified platform that meets the low latency and security requirements needed to support industrial robotic operations.

5G use case 2: automotive

Original Equipment Makers (OEMs) like Detroit’s 'Big Three' and others want to make autonomous vehicles a commercially viable reality. One goal is to produce a 'Level 4' (L4) autonomous car that carries people around as if they were cargo. The car does everything, perhaps not even having controls for a person to use. L4 vehicles need, what appears to be, an unsustainably costly amount of onboard compute power in order to function safely. This problem can be solved with a small-footprint edge computing solution that provides on-vehicle compute while offloading compute to an edge cloud.

5G use case 3: Aerospace and defence

This sector is largely interested in 5G for its relevance to Urban Air Mobility as well as the potential to maintain global technology leadership and ensure defense communications are optimised and secure. As a long-standing partner to the A&D industry, Wind River is already helping our customers capitalise on the opportunities and overcome the obstacles. Wind River can modernise aerospace and defense networks to take advantage of 5G’s new spectrum, with the required low latency and security.

Explore your potential 5G use cases

Of course, these are just a few examples of new 5G use cases. As the technology becomes more mainstream, all types of industries will be able to utilise increased data speeds to power additional applications. Organisations need the right solutions to help them develop and deploy the new products that meet the safety, security, reliability, and certifiability requirements needed in today’s market.