Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

5G: Empowering the Future of Industrial IoT

6 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:27

In this segment, the speaker outlines how 5G technology can transform industrial IoT deployments by delivering lower latency and vastly increased device capacity. The discussion highlights a typical factory scenario where thousands of rotating assets—motors, bearings, and other equipment—require continuous monitoring of temperature, vibration, pressure, and flow. By leveraging 5G’s fast data rates, factories can implement predictive maintenance, receiving early alerts when bearings wear and scheduling repairs before catastrophic failures halt production. The speaker contrasts 5G with alternative solutions such as CBRS, noting that traditional approaches would necessitate managing hundreds of gateways to support the same sensor density, leading to network congestion. Overall, the segment positions 5G as the enabling technology for high‑speed, large‑scale sensor networks essential for modern, data‑driven manufacturing.

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And then talking about 5G as well. So 5G on a high level is going to add lower latency speeds, so everything's gonna be communicating much quicker. And then you're also going to have a lot more devices, that capacity for your network. So we keep hearing about private wireless networks and 5G use cases. Well, if you think about a factory, any decent-sized factory, how many rotating assets they have, for example, You're going to want to do temperature vibration monitoring. So when those bearings start to wear, you can get kind of an insight alert to schedule some maintenance on it before it just runs to failure, and then you have production stopping. So there's a lot of sensors that'll add up over time. If you add up all the motors, you can have thousands of motors in the facility. And rather than trying to either run kind of a CBRS-based system or a lower latency, you're gonna have hundreds of gateways you're managing now. And then that's just for temperature vibration. You want to add pressure, flow, other metrics that can be critical to the process, and that tends to get pretty crowded. So I think 5G is one of those use cases that is going to provide that fast data speed with having a large number of devices on the network.