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The U.K. and U.S. are already falling behind the rest of the world in building a new global digital industrial economy
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Sweden’s NorthStar is an example of how Western comms companies can drive cyber-physical integration across industries
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5G is key to unlocking the next industrial revolution
In case you hadn’t noticed, the world is now split along technological as well as political lines. In the East, China and other countries are forging ahead with using virtual technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and 5G to transform traditional industries like energy, transport, mining and more.
Most of the West hasn’t really forged ahead with anything, really. In fact, it’s already years behind the Chinese in undertaking industrial cyber-physical integration at scale.
The West’s obduracy today portends disaster for its economies tomorrow. China has already proved that industries that integrate advanced digital technologies run cleaner, faster, safer and more profitably than those that don’t.
Within this dismal situation, Sweden’s NorthStar program shines as a laudable example of how Western countries and their industrial base can compete in the new global digital industrial economy.
Launched in 2023 by Ericsson, the comms vendor, and Telia, the Swedish carrier, NorthStar was created specifically to collaborate with Swedish industrial companies to help them reinvent their businesses using advanced digital technologies.
A 5G future
NorthStar focuses on using 5G as the platform upon which industrial transformation takes place. This tracks with its founders’ business priorities — Ericsson is a leading provider of 5G technology; Telia has deployed 5G across 90% of Sweden — but it also makes sense from a technology perspective, since cloud-native 5G is the layer that connects traditional data and voice telecom networks to the capabilities inherent in a new slate of Smart Cloud technologies. (See diagram below.)
When 5G first arrived, carriers around the world — but especially in North America — made the mistake of trying to deploy it as a cheap way to drive revenues by selling faster services to consumers. That didn’t work, partly because it’s not what 5G is designed for, and partly because the services that consumers might need more bandwidth for don’t exist yet. And this plunged carriers into a deep state of ennui from which some have yet to recover.
The NorthStar program is an antidote to false 5G expectations, embracing 5G’s true potential, which lies in fermenting and supporting the next great digital revolution – one which spans consumer and industrial worlds. So far, NorthStar has collaborated with Swedish companies to create around 30 industrial test cases, of which mining and autonomous driving are the furthest developed.
So why is Sweden getting this right when many other countries don’t “get it” at all?
“Swedish people are very much driven by innovation, and I think we are also quite good at collaborating - both with different industries and with the political system, in order to create advantages for our society,” Magnus Leonhart, head of innovation and strategy at Telia, told Fierce Network.
Policy, people
Politics has proven to be a decisive factor in whether countries attack the job of integrating digital technology into their industrial base, and which ones sit around talking about it, or getting it totally wrong. China’s unitary system of government allows it to make decisions and complete projects incredibly quickly compared to, say, America’s two-party system — especially when both U.S. parties have boldly embraced a new era of venality, entitlement and crass stupidity.
There is capitalist dogma in the mix here, of course. U.S. administrations are against funding any initiatives that they believe could instead be the remit of the private sector (a philosophy which explains why the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare and, ipso facto, the highest death rates for curable illnesses, and the highest maternal and infant mortality).
Congress has made an exception for broadband funding, mainly because the fact that 30 million of its citizens don’t have high-speed Internet access is a source of great embarrassment to the richest nation in the world.
But there is no U.S. government-initiated, taxpayer-supported strategy for industrial cyber-physical integration and it shows. And, the fact that China is so darn good at this stuff actually makes the U.S. less likely to develop one, because Socialism, or Communism, or whateverism. (More here on America’s latest national digital infrastructure failure).
What about Europe? It’s doing better than the U.S. (a very low bar) in part thanks to the European Union’s $2.21B CEF2 (Connecting Europe Facility), which funds private and public digital initiatives amongst its members.
CEF is an attempt to cut through the red tape and bureaucracy, for which the EU is famous, and accelerate deployment of high-capacity networks, including 5G, both nationally and across borders. Unlike the U.S. broadband initiative, it specifically encompasses funding for industry projects (transport and energy are the main focus, currently).
Sweden’s NorthStar program is partially funded by CEF2 money. This is an especially astute investment by the EU and a much better use of funds than, say, doling out money directly to the companies that run the vertical industries. NorthStar's founders — Ericsson and Telia — have both the knowledge of advanced digital technology required to digitize vertical industries and a ubiquitous 5G network in place to support the transition.
Essentially, NorthStar occupies a Goldilocks Zone between government and industry, taking dumb money from one and working with the other to develop use cases unique to each vertical. This is the new model for successfully building industrial digital infrastructure; other Western countries should take note.
“We give Swedish industries a head-start by allowing them access to technologies that exist but may not yet be commercially available. This allows them to start their technology research cycle earlier,” said Telia’s Magnus, citing NorthStar's work in creating an autonomous vehicle testing facility as a good example of this process.
This is England
Kudos to Sweden, then. But what of my birthplace, the U.K.? To my chagrin, it has an even worse digital infrastructure strategy than the U.S.
In the coming months, I’ll be sharing more about the U.K.’s failure to build operative digital infrastructure, and the lessons the rest of the world can take from it. It’s a story that combines hilarity and tragedy in equal measure.
As a taster, consider that London’s new Elizabeth Line cost $28 billion but leaves commuters off-grid when underground. This is because Crossrail, the government-backed company formed to build it, “forgot” to incorporate Wi-Fi in their plans. Less amusingly, a number of the U.K. government’s digital efforts have misfired so spectacularly that people have died as a direct consequence of them.
In contrast, the NorthStar program provides Sweden with a powerful advantage in the competition between East and West to attain dominance by building digitally enhanced industrial infrastructure — a rivalry that will be played out with bits and bytes and circuits and software, to the accompaniment of the beep-boop of robots and the electric hum of our new AI overlords.