When 4G arrived, it eventually replaced 3G.
It is assumed 5G will do the same.
It won’t.
Unlike previous generations, 5G wasn’t designed to replace LTE. It was designed to complement it.
4G LTE provides the broad-area coverage layer. 5G adds capacity where higher bandwidth is required—cities, stadiums, factories and other high-density environments.
Most remote telemetry devices don’t need hundreds of megabits per second. They need:
• Reliable coverage
• Long product life
• Low cost
• Global availability
A typical industrial device may only transfer a few megabytes of data each month. Whether the network supports 10 Mbps or 200 Mbps rarely changes the outcome.
Whether it has coverage certainly does.
That’s why we believe 4G LTE will remain the workhorse of Industrial IoT for many years, while 5G continues to expand as a complementary technology where additional capacity is needed.
