The arrival of 5G cellular technology was supposed to be the match that set the IoT world on fire, but it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. It’s not that the flames have been doused, but rather that IoT growth has smoldered instead of blazed.
5G itself has become widely deployed for a variety of use cases, but adoption has been slow for IoT-centric enterprise applications like health-related wearables, industrial IoT networks, surveillance and security, asset tracking and fleet management.
“In terms of latency and bandwidth, the vast majority of IoT devices do not need 5G,” says Jason Leigh, Research Manager, 5G & Mobility Research for IDC. “5G is like a Ferrari engine, but most cars don’t need a Ferrari engine.” The advanced capabilities of 5G also come at a price premium, and many IoT use cases cannot support the additional cost.
That could change, however, with a forthcoming 5G specification, dubbed RedCap, that is designed specifically for IoT devices. RedCap could be the spark that sets the IoT world ablaze.
What is RedCap?
The next generation of cellular technology is 5G Advanced or 5.5G. The spec is expected to be approved within a year. A key feature that will be included in 5G Advanced is a device category called “New Radio Reduced-Capability (RedCap) devices.”
RedCap includes a mix of capabilities that balance factors such as coverage and throughput with constraints such as limited battery life and a lack of antennas. The combination supports use cases that do not always need the high-performance capabilities of current 5G technology, but which would scale faster over advanced cellular networks.
“A major reason the adoption of 5G in the IoT space has been slow is because legacy technologies work just fine for many of these use cases,” Leigh says. If connectivity options like WiFi and legacy 3G LTE are working, there’s no real incentive to change, and while 3G has been phased out in the U.S., in much of the world it still dominates.
With RedCap, the hope is that IoT networks will benefit from the increasing scale of 5G deployments, which will make IoT feasible in a greater number of locations and for a greater number of devices. Since many constrained IoT devices will have fewer on-device capabilities, RedCap will make it easier for device manufacturers to prioritize things like low power consumption and ruggedization.
What are the hurdles facing RedCap?
As carriers and telcos rushed to build out the first wave of 5G networks, they split 5G deployments into two categories: standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA). Today, the majority of 5G networks are NSA 5G, which are typically a mix of 5G radio access gear and 4G infrastructure.
However, as the specification stands now, it appears that RedCap will require operators to deploy 5G SA, which is still a minority of 5G deployments. According Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), 259 operators in 102 countries have launched commercial 5G services, but only 41 operators have launched or deployed public 5G SA networks, while 115 are included in a broader category that includes evaluating, testing, piloting and planning SA networks.
As 5G SA expansions steadily increase, RedCap promises to be an important bridge from legacy connectivity to standardized all-5G ecosystems.
RedCap testing is already underway
Even though 5.5G is still at least several months away from becoming an official specification, mobile vendors and operators aren’t waiting. They are…
