Revenue generated by operators from roaming IoT devices will double over the next five years to reach $2.2 billion in 2029, Juniper Research predicted, with use cases requiring enhanced connectivity expected to drive the increase.   

In its latest market report the analyst house forecast 5G devices would likely still contribute less than 10 per cent of roaming IoT connections in 2029, but account for 40 per cent of associated operator revenue.

To help up revenue from IoT roaming, Juniper Research anticipates operators will be able to apply a premium price for 5G-enhanced connections which can deliver “mission critical” services.

Here, the use of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) was deemed “crucial” across applications including IoT-based maintenance in connected vehicles.

The analyst house also noted the use of enhanced connectivity would “necessitate the development of roaming steering between network slices” to optimise quality of service.

Author of the study and research analyst at Juniper Research Alex Webb noted to “effectively meet quality of service requirements, operators must provide enterprises with tools which allow them to input their connectivity requirements, enabling operators to steer IoT roaming connections to the optimal network slice”.

If you’re a business just starting on your journey to unwire your facility — be that a busy factory or a carpeted office — you may be wondering how best to do that. Just use the public 4G or 5G network, use a separate private network, or attach to a mobile operator’s 5G network slice?

Fierce wondered the same recently as we shuttled around downtown Boston between Ericsson and Verizon conferences. 

Both 5G network slicing and 5G private networking use standalone 5G. The standalone 5G slicing capability allows an operator to create multiple virtual networks on top of its pure 5G infrastructure. This can allow an operator to create separate network streams with an allocated bandwidth amount for customers like broadcasters and enterprises.

Network slicing requires the public network to support standalone capabilities to operate. A business can create its own standalone network with a separate private 5G network.

In the United States, network slicing is slowly starting to emerge from beta as a prospect for enterprises, largely for select broadcasters, enterprises and sports teams. But 5G network slicing is already common in China and is emerging in India. 

So Fierce thought it would be interesting to ask Ericsson and Verizon about whether enterprises would choose private networking or network slicing for enterprise tasks and applications.

Surprise! The operator and vendor both said that for 4G or 5G they prefer private networking for enterprise applications. However, we think we may have got a different response from a Chinese operator on this, and we definitely would have a different answer from an Indian operator like Jio, which started to offer 5G network slicing in the first quarter of 2024, ahead of rolling out 5G private networking.

Operator overview

Mike Caralis, VP of business markets at Verizon, told us in Boston that he thinks that private networks are — and will remain — a big business even as network slicing comes online. 

“When you have a private network, a customer wants very much 100% control of that network,” Caralis said. He noted that an enterprise customer can even configure network slices on their own 5G private network — because it is a self-contained standalone network — and add in additional security and other features.

Of course, private networks are currently a booming business for Verizon. “We sold more private networks in the first quarter of this year than we sold in prior year,” Caralis noted.

That doesn’t mean that he discounts network slicing as a feature. Noting that Verizon has now rolled out standalone 5G in several states, Caralis said that network slicing will allow the operator to offer “bit rate control” over the public network to customers, through the use of a virtual slice. Still, that’s probably more interesting to gamers than accountants or sales people at an enterprise.

Vendor viewpoint

Ericsson is also hot on the private network business. Huawei leads as a private network vendor, followed by Nokia and then Ericsson. The Swedish vendor, however, has just launched new private radio products aimed at closing the gap.

Peter Linder, head of thought leadership at Ericsson North America said that the company is still figuring out how to sell network slices as they finally become available to a wider population. He said that the industry needs to adopt the road model —think bike lanes, bus lanes and car lanes — for network slicing. 

That, however, is still in the future for Ericsson. The back half of this year will be focused on selling its Ericsson enterprise private networking gear.

The analyst angle

“I think private 5G is being considered by the enterprises based on different criteria — they want private, controlled, reliable and good [quality of service],” Roy Chua, principal analyst at AvidThink, said in an email to Fierce. “Network slices of a public network may not provide the coverage needed indoors or in rural areas that carriers have no incentives to cover (oil and gas fields, mines, agricultural farmland etc.),” he added.

“Many early private 5G use cases are related to Industry 4.0 use cases, which favor tight coupling with the application infrastructure (control and monitoring systems, surveillance systems, etc.), and for which customers like stronger isolation and security,” Chua concluded.

Speed will be critical to 6G, but not the kind measured in download and upload rates. Instead, a White House official argued, the velocity has to come in the standards-setting sphere.

“We need to be positioned, before 6G comes out, to be in a leadership position,” said Caitlin Clarke, a special assistant to President Biden and senior director for cyber and emerging technology on the National Security Council, in a panel on White House 6G policies and initiatives at 6GWorld’s conference here. “We need to think about where we need to be now, before the technology is in place.”

Clarke did not specify the country that the U.S. and its allies needed to get ahead of, but she didn’t need to before an audience of industry and policy types already mindful of China’s efforts to advance 6G.

“There is too much subsidy,” she said. “There is not an even playing field.”

Opening doors to a more secure future

But while Washington can’t match Beijing’s telecom-subsidy budget, it can use its leverage in standards bodies to make 6G not just more secure but also more open than 5G, and therefore more open to innovation in the U.S. and allied countries.

“Define what security means in 6G, so we are not chasing it after the fact,” she advised in what sounded like a reference to the rip-and-replace struggles of U.S. operators with Huawei network gear deemed untrustworthy by the FCC. “6G needs to be open from the get-go, so we can have more players in the technology.”

Another speaker on the panel, Thomas Rondeau, principal director of the Defense Department’s FutureG Office, picked up on that security theme by noting how often DoD deployments overseas require using existing wireless infrastructure.

Open RAN, which could ease deploying new networks from scratch, would be “a great start,” he said. But the DOD’s ambitions go beyond that to “open-source the entire thing” with its Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) initiative for 5G networks.

“We’re going to out-innovate our adversaries, because that’s what we do best in this country,” Rondeau said.

The third speaker on the panel, Cohere Technologies Chairman and CEO Ray Dolan, further amplified that message of openness and innovation.

“It’s that collective R&D intensity that can work well,” he said, adding that opening networks should be a 5G priority too. “Don’t wait for 6G to be open.”

He also suggested that virtualizing 5G networks will ease the path to 6G by reducing the need for costly network-gear investments, something carriers have already fretted about.

“6G cannot be another massive hardware upgrade,” Dolan said. “Allow the continued virtualization of the network to drive through 6G and beyond.”

Carriers’ concerns

But the ensuing conversation among those three panelists, moderated by Open RAN Policy Coalition Executive Director Diane Rinaldo, offered reminders that the short-term motivations of operators may not appear to align with these longer-term priorities.

Rondeau warned against sales pitches for open networks that boil down to little more than “China bad,” while Clarke said arguments for Open RAN need to account for operator anxiety over costs.

She suggested security as a counter to that concern – “here’s a technological solution that can help you be more secure” – adding that government funding for Open RAN upgrades could further loosen that sticking point.

Dolan predicted that even before 6G, Open RAN can wring greater efficiency out of existing spectrum by including more processing power in each radio.

“Let’s make the existing spectrum even more effective,” he said. “That’s what open does.”

As Clarke did not need to invoke China by name at the start of the panel, Dolan didn’t need to remind attendees that Congress’s ongoing failure to renew the FCC’s spectrum-auction authority consigns discussions of future spectrum bands into the realm of wish-casting.

Rondeau, meanwhile, put in a plug for network self-determination as a core feature of Open RAN that countries tempted by cheaper, closed platforms should weigh heavily.

“It’s about your sovereignty over your own future,” he said. “You need to have control of that network.”

The wireless telecom industry experienced continued strong wireless cellular expansion in the second quarter of 2024, powered by continuing growth in the IoT ecosystem, according to industry body 5G Americas. According to data from 5G Americas and analysts Omdia, in Q2 2024, the global adoption of 5G connections exceeded two billion with an addition of 192 million new global connections. Looking ahead, Omdia data suggests global 5G connections will reach 8.6 billion by 2029. As a share of all wireless cellular technologies, 5G is expected to be 59 percent of global access networks by 2029.

In the last quarter, 5G connections in North America totalled 242 million, comprising 34 percent of all wireless cellular connections. The addition of 23 million new 5G connections represents 11 percent growth quarter over quarter. By 2029, North American 5G connections are forecast to grow to 761 million, representing 84 percent of all wireless cellular access technologies.

From a network deployment standpoint, the global number of deployed 5G networks has now exceeded the pace of 4G LTE network deployments at the equivalent time in the technology cycle. Currently, there are 329 commercial 5G networks worldwide, a number that is expected to grow alongside continued significant investments in 5G infrastructure worldwide.

IoT rising

5G Americas suggests an important part of the growth is coming from IoT connected devices like sensors, cameras, and many more solutions in both public and private 5G networks. According to 5G Americas and Omdia data, global IoT subscriptions currently stand at 3.4 billion, complemented by 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions.

As 4G LTE-connected IoT devices are upgraded to flexible 5G-enabled IoT technologies, such as 5G RedCap (Reduced Capability), new enhancements offer network operators benefits such as improved energy and network efficiency. Due to these improvements, global forecasts suggest IoT subscriptions will reach 5.2 billion, while smartphone subscriptions will grow to 8.2 billion by 2029.

Latin America growing

Latin America also witnessed solid growth in 4G LTE and 5G connections, adding three million new LTE connections for a total of 592 million across the region, representing 74 percent of all wireless cellular access technologies in Q2 2024. Additionally, the region continues to embrace 5G with ten million new connections added, to reach a total of 57 million 5G connections that reflects a steady 21 percent growth rate. 

O2 Telefonica now reaches more than 96% of the German population with its 5G service

German carrier O2 Telefónica said it has deployed a total of 1,900 transmitters across Germany since the beginning, the telco said in a release. The carrier, owned by Spanish telco Telefonica, also said it has completed around 4,800 expansion measures since the beginning of the year to improve its network infrastructure.

“We are continuously investing in a more powerful O2 network in order to optimize the daily digital experience for our customers. New smartphone generations and applications such as AI tools are placing ever higher demands on mobile connectivity. By expanding our 5G and 4G networks, we are ensuring that our customers are always well connected and can exploit the full potential of digital opportunities,” said Matthias Sauder, director of networks at O2 Telefónica

As a result of the expansion measures, O2 Telefonica now reaches more than 96% of the German population with its 5G service.

In the last three months, the telco’s technicians have put 5G into operation on the 3.6 GHz frequencies in cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Mannheim, Munich, Essen, Düsseldorf and Cologne.

In October 2023, O2 Telefonica announced the launch of its 5G Standalone (SA) network in the country under the 5G Plus brand. Until this launch, the German telco had been offering 5G services through the NonStandalone (NSA) 5G architecture partly via its LTE/4G core network.

The carrier noted that the 5G SA network will enable customers to have access to voice-over-new-radio (VoNR) technology, which enables them to make calls with even better voice quality over the 5G network.

O2 Telefónica said it has already been using the 5G SA technology in 5G campus networks for companies and public authorities since 2020. With this new launch, the company noted that more companies in different sectors such as industry, healthcare and the public sector will have access to improved connectivity.

The carrier’s 5G Plus uses frequencies in the 700 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 3.6 GHz bands.

The telco said it expects its 5G SA service to reach full coverage in Germany by the end of 2025.

Last year, O2 Telefónica and Ericsson had completed a proof of concept (PoC) with the aim of paving the way for the development of 5G cloud RAN technology in Europe.

Ericsson and O2 Telefonica noted that this collaboration “validates the feasibility” of cloud RAN for enterprise and industry-specific use cases as well as fixed wireless access (FWA) use cases.