With 5G rolling out and the Internet of Things accelerating, we are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This new era promises unprecedented automation, convenience, and connectivity, and presents significant opportunities for Communication Service Providers (CSPs).
Yet alongside these opportunities come fresh challenges. As CSPs move into a lucrative industrial market, operations and service delivery will become far more complex. Critical functions will demand near-perfect uptime and reliability, driving the need for new methods of designing, building, and operating networks that rely heavily on automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence.
The industrial sector is inherently more complex than the consumer market. In many industrial applications, network availability can mean the difference between life and death—from remote surgical procedures to autonomous vehicle control. There will be no one-size-fits-all solution; the communications landscape must evolve with new business models and new players filling roles that are only beginning to emerge.
Just as you wouldn’t send a patient to a car mechanic, you shouldn’t expect the same network to serve both a hospital and a fleet of autonomous cars. While the underlying technologies may be similar, the requirements differ dramatically: maintaining a patient’s heartbeat, safeguarding passenger safety, and precisely positioning heavy machinery in a factory each demand distinct performance and reliability characteristics. Raw speed and low latency alone don’t solve these varied needs.
Network slicing is the primary tool for managing this complexity and building networks capable of meeting diverse device and application requirements. By harmonizing layers into a unified digital operations model, network slicing enables operators to meet the strictest demands for latency and reliability. This approach opens new markets and allows CSPs to extract greater value from their infrastructure.
Through network slicing, operators can actively manage every connection so that time-critical control is guaranteed. This is a premium offering that justifies premium pricing, but it also requires substantial investment and careful planning now to be viable in the future.
Effective network slicing depends on extreme levels of automation, predictive analytics, and continuous monitoring and management. CSPs must also proactively decide which industries and use cases to support. Today that means cloudifying operations and investing in predictive and automation technologies. Tomorrow it means creating new commercial models to deliver bespoke, premium services that meet the diverse service level agreements and specialized requirements industrial customers demand—requirements that cannot be met by a single static network configuration but can be satisfied by dynamically managed slices.
Choosing which industries to target and identifying IoT use cases now will help CSPs transition smoothly into industrial markets, join emerging ecosystems, and secure a central role in Industry 4.0. The industrial landscape differs substantially from the consumer market, and CSPs must invest in the right technologies and processes today to meet tomorrow’s connectivity demands—and to stay ahead of new entrants seeking to capture parts of this growing market.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss these topics? Attend co-located events such as the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series, which host gatherings in major hubs including Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.