LIVE FROM MWL UNWRAPPED: Andreas Mueller, project director for 6G at manufacturing giant Bosch, voiced confidence in the prospects of private 5G in his sector though acknowledged the wireless technology had been initially overhyped.

During his keynote the executive, who is also general chair of the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation, highlighted a need for the alignment of traditional industry with the ICT sector to deliver on the promise of 5G.

Bosch started its preparation activities for adoption of the then upcoming network technology in 2017.

At that stage, he noted, “manufacturing was certainly the sweet spot that everybody was very interested in, and I’m still very confident that this is still the biggest opportunity of private 5G”.

However, he added despite having conducted many proofs of concept and testbeds the company was yet to deploy “5G in all our factories for productive use because we notice, and we think that’s the same for the other stakeholders, that is was a bit overhyped”.

“The expectations were very high at the beginning,” he explained. “Things had been promised but then we came back to reality: not everything is available from day one, not everything in the standards goes into the products immediately and also coming up with a convincing return on investment, at the beginning at least, was not straightforward.”

Mueller noted these factors had caused a delay in widespread adoption, though pointed to an increasing number of large businesses in sectors including automotive and the chemical industry now putting plans into action.

This, along with other developments, he expects will bolster the ecosystem and adoption.

Closing gaps
Other challenges cited by the expert were around aligning industries and expectations, noting manufacturers required a much longer lifetime for their devices than a typical mobile operator customer.

“We are buying a new smartphone every two years on average but lifetime of equipment of a factory could be ten, 15 or even 20 years in some cases, and you will not just replace everything just because you want to use 5G,” he added.

Another issue cited was the “gap between standards and implementation” with the expert adding “if you look at the standards many features are really cool from the perspective of the industrial domain, that provide a lot of value compared to other wireless technologies like Wi-Fi”.

Here, he pointed to “low latency high reliability communication or support for time sensitive networking, which is basically a real-time ethernet over 5G”.

“All these are very interesting features and have been also shaped and driven by the manufacturing industry, but only a fraction have been implemented in the chipsets and the infrastructure components,” Mueller said.

“Therefore we have an ecosystem challenge, the OT industry has to work hand in hand with the ICT industry to get over this.”

However, despite these challenges he noted “we still see a lot of potential to use 5G to be able to life Industry 4.0 to the next level. What we see is the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry so connectivity plays a central role”.  

Replays of all Unwrapped interviews this week will be available at: https://www.mobileworldlive.com/unwrapped/the-5g-evolution/