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    What will happen when 5G meet in manufacturing?

    The 5th Generation has developed rapidly in recent years. Many people have upgraded their networks from the 4th Generation to the 5th Generation and enjoy its speed. However, the 5th Generation not only affects the lives of the public, but also brings changes to many industries, and manufacturing is one of them. If you are still waiting to see whether to introduce the 5th Generation for enterprises or factories, you may wish to take a look and make further evaluations. It is not a bad thing.

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    What is 5G?

    5G is the abbreviation of the 5th Generation Mobile Networks, which is the global wireless network communication protocol after the 4th Generation. In contrast, the 5th Generation has faster, more stable, and almost no delay network transmission. Completed framework will bring smarter, more connected, and more changeable business models to the manufacturing industry.

    What value will 5th Generation bring?

    In the past, the 4th Generation replaced the 3rd Generation to bring faster networks, change the habits of the public, and drive the market development of mobile phones and software. 5th Generation is not only faster, it has three breakthroughs with great significance, and it is also the real value of the 5th Generation.

    • High speed: 5th Generation is the speed at which users upload or download information. The maximum network speed of the 5th Generation is about 1Gbps to 10Gbps, and the average minimum is at least 50Mbps. Compared with the 4th Generation, it is a 5 to 100 times improvement, and this improvement benefits many manufacturers. It can transmit a huge amount of information, whether it is AIoT (AI+IoT ) high-definition video or AR, etc., which will be affected by the 5th Generation.


    • Low latency: This delay is defined as the time to transmit information from point A to point B. For the 4th Generation, it may be around 20 to 50 milliseconds, however, the 5th Generation only needs 1 to 5 milliseconds to transmit the same information, or even quicker. Such low latency has a great impact on many industries, such as automatic steering, most of which are still based on calculations inside the car. If the delay time is too long, there will be insufficient time to reflect the real traffic conditions. The low latency of the 5th Generation will give the system sufficient time to transmit information to the cloud, process and analyze it, and then send it back for decision-making.


    • High stability: The stability can be divided into three parts, packet loss rate, stability, and error rate. 5th Generation has technological breakthroughs in these three fields, so it can achieve the task almost perfectly, and these three parts It is very important for the manufacturing industry, especially the stability, which can avoid problems in the production line due to the network, resulting in losses during the process.


    The above three factors have a considerable impact in on the manufacturing industry, and there are many applications from research and development, supply chain, production line to market and sales, and even after-sales service.


    The benefits of 5th Generation

    5th Generation technology is a very critical and far-reaching technology for smart manufacturing, IoT-related products, and connected supply chains. Therefore, no manufacturing industry can ignore such key technologies. What kind of benefits can the 5th Generation bring?

    1. Process optimization: Real-time data access from machines, and inventories to production lines can greatly improve the precision of analysis which can also assist in the scheduling and smoothness of production cycles, and even reduce the generation of waste.
    2. Manufacturing modularization: 5th Generation has high connection density, speed, bandwidth and low delay, which can drive great production flexibility, such as on-demand mass customized manufacturing is possible to realize.
    3. Enterprise connectivity: 5th Generation can integrate enterprise resources, including factory construction, technology, resources, and enterprise IT systems, and further optimize processes and remote control.
    4. Human-machine interface: It is no longer limited to the landline and can provide various mobile data and visual solutions to meet the needs of communication between various machines and products.
    5. Supply chain integration: With the advancement of the Internet, the transparency of the supply chain can be continuously improved, and perfect integration can be carried out to bring about faster and automated operations, reduce delays, and improve production efficiency.
    6. Maintenance and monitoring: If the layout of sensors has become more intensive, it can monitor the status of the equipment in real-time, collect information for analysis, and perform predictive maintenance on the equipment when needed to prevent it from damaging.
    7. Safety: For the manufacturing industry, safety is a very important issue. Can the real response time of 5G be used to bring safer manufacturing equipment to enterprises, and even responsive emergency notifications?

    As stated above, we can know the benefits that the 5th Generation can bring to factories and enterprises, but in fact, it is not easy to achieve the goal of automation through the 5th Generation. It is necessary to consider the construction cost, potential commercial value, the security of wireless networks, etc, all need to be evaluated in order to truly bring benefits to the enterprise.

    The challenges of 5th Generation

    Although there are many benefits of the 5th Generation mentioned above, the network of the factory is interwoven with various types, it does not mean that all of them should be wireless or 5th Generation, but need to be researched and verified by practice, even low latency and high reliability may have limitation. In addition, industrial applications have strict requirements on latency. Low latency in operation is an unavoidable condition, but whether it can achieve "real-time" is not clear. We can determine that the 5th Generation still has a certain influence on smart factories, especially automation and manufacturing employees who need to move frequently. Therefore, the 5th Generation can create more value by combining it with other technologies.

    Conclusion

    Although the 5th Generation is not popular yet, through understanding beforehand, it is not a bad thing to have a strategic perspective reviewing the value brought by the 5th Generation, and even try new technologies after evaluation to bring more benefits to enterprises and factories and have a stronger competitive advantage in the market.

    Main image photo by adobestock

    References oosca/Pwc

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