Comment by mytailorisrich
2 years ago
> An area where failure is not an option and could put at risk automation processes, critical infrastructure, livelihoods, if not lives themselves.
Which is exactly 5G's sales pitch, which is designed for low latency and high reliability aimed at critical applications like factory automation, remote surgery, self-driving cars, etc. And there is currently a push for 5G private networks.
So it remains to be seen if this gets any traction.
The problem is that the 5G hype isnt telling the whole story. Yes, you certainly could drive high thruput across the radio access network, at low latency, and yes, thats exactly what you would need to do things like self driving cars. The problem is that the radio is just one tiny part of the whole communication chain, and for safety-critical things, the entire chain must be equally fast and robust.
That means, for example, that the chip inside the car/robot must detect failures in the transmission path incredibly quickly and switch to a secondary channel, that the radio controller can detect when the network (packet core) it thought it was talking to goes away, and recover, and that the packet core itself can detect failures in its components and fail over or restart. It has to do all this in the time it takes for a warehouse robot to crush a worker, or a car to hit a bollard. Did I mention that todays packet cores are built from kubernetes and prayers? This degree of safety simply isnt happening anytime soon.
Perversely, it might actually be safer to deploy an entirely private network under the control of an enterprise and take your lumps there as best you can, than rely on an operator's network being able to do what you want all the time.
The radio is just a small part of 5G. The whole system is designed for these use cases.
So yes, this requires upgrades to fully compliant packet cores, which is expensive and not really happening because there is actually no business case at the moment.
Anything needing high reliability is plugged in. Actual remote surgery involves an on site backup surgeon, and redundant private wired links.