Questions Abound Over Manufacturers' Eagerness to Adopt 5G

Governments worldwide are generally failing at making more spectrum available for 5G, former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said Tuesday at the virtual 5G Manufacturing Forum. “Not enough attention is being placed and not enough spectrum is being cleared … given the transformational nature” of 5G, O’Rielly said. Other speakers said challenges remain to broader use of 5G by manufacturers.

O’Rielly criticized recent delays in the deployment of the C band because of FAA concerns (see 2111040042). “There is really no evidence of harm,” he said. “It’s a breakdown of the process.”

Regulators need to meet different demands, said Philip Marnick, Ofcom group director-spectrum. Carriers are looking for national coverage, but private networks don’t need big national licenses, he said. The U.K. has made spectrum available for local licenses at 3.8-4.2 and 26 GHz. “It’s a really important thing we need to think about as we go forward,” he said.

The FCC did a good job on making high-band available and there’s not much low-band left to work with, said Dave Wright, president of the OnGo Alliance. Major carriers “are in some stage of refarming” their low-band for 5G, he said. The consensus is mid-band is “the sweet spot for 5G” and “we have been behind there,” he said.

One of the advantages of the citizens broadband radio service band is that it can be used in varying ways by different users, Wright said. When regulators allocate spectrum for a single purpose “you’re inherently limiting the size of the ecosystem that can form around that band,” he said. The more devices, “the better the economics,” he said.

CBRS “has been a smashing success,” O’Rielly said. The FCC has moved away from allocating spectrum for a single purpose, with “really flexible” licenses. “Where is the next band coming from?” he asked: “Where is the pipeline coming from?”

The lack of 5G devices and a supporting ecosystem, the need for finalized standards and spectrum concerns are slowing 5G adoption by manufacturers, said Leo Gergs, ABI Research senior analyst. Standards “have somewhat been finalized [but] it still hasn’t trickled down into the device ecosystem,” he said. There are no 3rd Generation Partnership Project Release 16 devices available for industrial users, he said.

The spectrum landscape is “very, very fragmented,” Gergs said. The U.S. supports shared spectrum for private networks, including in the citizens broadband radio service band, and the U.K. is moving toward that approach, he said: Other countries in Europe and Asia favor setting aside licensed spectrum for industrial users. The bands set aside also vary by country. “Even though there is a lot of movement happening, the lack of globally harmonized spectrum is still an important inhibitor for a large manufacturer to deploy 5G on their factory floor” if they have plants in different countries, he said.

Stephen Mellor, chief technical officer of the Industry IoT Consortium, questioned the extent 5G will make a big difference for manufacturing. The typical factory is 19 years old and “you’ll be lucky to have 2G,” he said. “In the end, what we’re concerned about is delivering widgets,” he said: “Where does 5G help us in that area?” It's “is just another technology and next year it’ll be 6G … and there will be more conferences with piles and piles and piles of hype,” he said.

The wireless industry has been guilty in the past of overhyping new generations of wireless, saying they would do “something really amazing,” said Richard Piasentin, chief strategy officer at Accedian, a networking company. The migration from 2G to 3G to 4G was about “making a pipe bigger, but that was it,” he said. Moving to 5G brings in edge computing and private networking “day one built into the standard,” he said.

Potential 5G use cases are “infinite,” said Rob Kasegrande, Deloitte managing director. “There is focus now on what use cases can really bridge together sort of the digital and physical world of manufacturing.” Quality sensing and detection, asset intelligence and performance, augmented workforce efficiency and safety and smart warehouses are leading use cases, he said. “The reality is manufacturers can’t take these all on at once,” he said: “It’s certainly difficult to scale.” Manufacturers are embracing 5G, but deployments will take time and require multiple steps, he said. “Different use cases are going to have different requirements,” he said.

Another question is whether open radio access networks are mature, said Per Kangru, technologist at Viavi Solutions. ORAN frontal specifications have had six revisions since March 2019 and the changes aren’t over, he said. “If you buy an ORAN system today, is it going to be compatible with … forward-looking changes, will it be compatible between the different vendors?” he asked. “It’s an extremely fragmented landscape out there today and many of the vendors have limited cash flow,” he said. Manufacturers have to ask what will happen to the gear they buy once the inevitable consolidation starts, he said.