You’ve probably seen the Mobile Experts Readiness Wheel, where we highlight the need for multiple tech enablers to come together. Wireless industrial automation will only “roll” at scale when all of these factors are mature.
This week, we released our deep-dive study on Cellular IoT Devices and the issues related to their development and use. Growth is motoring along nicely, especially in key vertical markets such as asset tracking, drones and white goods. But we believe that growth could be stronger if the wireless industry would simply STOP releasing new standards.
Don’t get me wrong. RedCap and eRedCap will work great. They offer higher speeds than today’s Cat-M and Cat-1.bis solutions. There will be some energy savings. But most customers don’t want higher speeds. Customers want lower cost, and they want longevity of support.
Some analysts have claimed that RedCap devices will be cheaper than Cat-1.bis. I find this unlikely based on technology content. The 5G stack is thicker than the 4G stack, with more horsepower needed for security and signal processing. RedCap devices may benefit from using a lower process node in the modem, providing some energy savings and cost savings, but a Cat-1.bis modem on the same process node would cost even less.
Talk to customers. You’ll find out that they’re confused by all the options. Why do we have more than 20 different air interface options within the 3GPP umbrella, ranging from GPRS to 5G RedCap? You’ll also find out that they don’t expect to upgrade their IoT devices every year or two like a smartphone. They want to deploy an IoT device and leave it alone for 20 or 30 years.
Stop the madness
In the 3GPP community, it’s a reflex to keep pumping out new standards every 18 months, whether they are needed or not. Let’s step back and take a look at what’s going on in IoT. Some customers need up to 10-20 Mbps data speeds, but more than 75% of the market will be happy with 100 kbps. The challenge for the industry is to reduce cost and provide a stable catalog of devices so that developers can integrate devices into IT/OT applications with confidence. Instead we are increasing cost and changing the devices over and over again.
The standards don’t match the market, so suppliers are dragging their feet. A new standard is adopted in the smartphone world within a few months, because it’s a big market where customers buy new phones constantly. But in the C-IoT world, we see the first RedCap devices now despite standards availability in 2022. There are multiple reasons. The operators are slow to implement SA core networks, the chip vendors are slow to push new modems through development, and module vendors are slow to implement the modems with various frequency band support combinations.
In my opinion, the cellular IoT market and the private cellular market are linked together. Cellular IoT will grow faster, and private cellular will grow faster if the industry can settle on a short list of preferred radio standards and STICK WITH THEM for 10 years or more. We can still enhance security and add more microcontroller processing power – and make other changes with new devices or better networks. But the RF standard needs to become more stable, so that enterprise customers feel more comfortable in making an investment.
Fragmentation is the issue
We have 20 different cellular IoT radio standards, and thousands of combinations of frequency bands, and variations of SIM, eSIM and iSIM. We have different choices for microcontrollers and memory on the modules. If Quectel, Fibocom, Telit and Ublox developed every permutation of these factors, they would have billions of different product configurations. That's ridiculous. Only 550 million devices will be sold this year.
For a healthy device ecosystem, we need to settle into a market with 10-20 modules as building blocks, with 50 million+ volume for each individual module. And we need to stick with the basics of these modules for more than 10 years. That will give the chip vendors an incentive to push costs down. It’ll give developers a known stable platform to work on. Put simply, re-hashing the standard does more harm than good.
Joe Madden is principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.