In a recent blog post about the UK’s somewhat slow adoption of 5G compared to other nations, we talked about one of the causes being a low understanding or awareness of private 5G and what it can do.
Many of the people we speak to still don’t fully understand the real benefits of 5G and the differences between public and private 5G. Many think 5G is simply 4G but faster, potentially missing out on some of the bigger, more exciting benefits it can bring.
The old adage goes: You don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s one of the biggest challenges we face with our Harwell Science and Innovation Campus project.
While people understand that 5G is faster than other types of connectivity, with better bandwidth and so on, it’s hard to pinpoint specific use cases that really make the most of what 5G can deliver. And that’s because many of them simply don’t exist yet.
Our job is to hunt down those use cases by providing the technology on the campus and then allowing people and businesses there to explore what it can do.
In the meantime, however, we’ve created a simple framework – a series of questions – to help us uncover and categorise use cases faster and more effectively.
Here’s what it looks like.
1. Is it indoor or outdoor?
Indoor and outdoor use cases differ in terms of range and clutter. Indoor manufacturing use cases, for example, are very different from something like outdoor wireless connectivity for students.
2. Is it wide area or mobile?
Wireless use cases could be about devices that move about, or they could be about connecting static devices over a wide area. In both cases, wired connections are impractical.
3. Is the challenge about coverage or technical features?
It’s important to know what’s driving the use case: is it a lack of existing public network coverage or capacity? Or perhaps because of a technical performance or configuration issue – public networks are good for downloading data but not so good for uploading data, for example.
4. Who’s buying the service?
Different buyers will naturally have different needs, whether they’re a business or retailer looking to provide a service, researchers looking for ultra-low latency for something like robotics, or an individual who just wants better connectivity. Talking with potential users and thinking about their challenges is a good way to uncover use cases.
Why we need to go hunting for use cases
As we mentioned at the start of this blog, because 5G is a relatively new technology, people don’t always have a strong idea about what it could help them achieve vs. other types of connectivity.
We can’t sell it to them as a theory – they need the chance to use it themselves and explore those use cases in the real world.
The truth is, there is no ready-made list of challenges or requirements to which the answer is 5G. And if you ask someone what they want it for they’ll say, ‘Well, what can it do?’
And so you get stuck in a cycle where neither the seller nor the buyer knows what this technology is needed for (beyond the most obvious uses like faster, more reliable internet or higher bandwidth).
Our Harwell project breaks that cycle by putting the tech in people’s hands and letting them discover those needs for themselves.
Creating a blueprint that works for all
It’s early days at the moment, of course, and with this kind of innovation project there’s always a chance we won’t uncover enough use cases to make it commercially viable in the long term.
But there are already some well-proven applications of 5G like predictive maintenance, asset tracking, robotics, wireless machine controls and more. And if we can uncover some of the less obvious use cases, we can use that to create a blueprint for 5G innovation all over the UK. In short: build it once, replicate everywhere.
By doing that, we’ll not only advance 5G innovation for people, businesses and other organisations across the country – we’ll help put the UK much further forward on the global 5G stage.