LIVE FROM HANNOVER MESSE, GERMANY: Industrial 5G advocate Andreas Mueller warned ICT players must adapt to dealing with longer timelines and more conservative customers than they may be used to when deploying the technology for industrial use cases, though believes it will ultimately prove successful.

The general chair of the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA) and 6G project director at Robert Bosch expects the technology to make an impact in industry but acknowledged it was taking longer than initially anticipated.

Speaking in the Industrial 5G: State of the Union session, Mueller said this pace was not unusual for a new technology in the industrial space given the segment’s lengthy lifecycles and generally conservative outlook.

Mueller pointed to several other technologies entering the segment which had long development cycles and the fact Industry 4.0 had being a topic at Hannover Messe since 2011, but “we are still working on it to make the full vision a reality”.

“Industrial 5G is in good company…it’s really not a sprint, it’s a marathon”.

He added manufacturing “is really a very conservative industry. Especially, I think, the players from the ICT industry have to learn this. It’s not like [a] smartphone that you buy a new robot every two years. You have longer lifecycles and this is one of the reasons it takes longer for proper adoption”.  

He described the mobile network technology as a “building block” in fostering digital transformation, alongside the complementary ones of edge computing, digital twins, AI and machine learning.

All of these innovations, he noted, had to “come together to make this a big success”.

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There’s a lot of money going into private networks [and] industrial 5G, and it’s always a good idea to see where the money is going if you want to anticipate the future

Andreas Mueller – general chair 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation

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Looking at positive movements within industry, he pointed to wider adoption of private networks, development of features within chipsets, ethernet PDU transmissions and red-cap 5G “adding value” to the ecosystem.

Mueller also cited “productive deployments” from big players in the automotive, chemical and aircraft industries, with “smaller ones” expected to follow.

“There’s a lot of money going into private networks [and] industrial 5G, and it’s always a good idea to see where the money is going if you want to anticipate the future. That’s why industrial 5G is coming, a bit later than expected but it is still coming.”