According to Frost & Sullivan, 5G is driving uptake of Industry 4.0 in process industries. The research firm has released a report, 5G in Process Industries, which finds that the higher bandwidth and lower latency of 5G over 4G together with the rising number of smart sensors and increasing adoption of M2M technologies are the chief factors.

The firm said that falling prices of technologies such as machine learning and Big Data analytics are pushing manufacturers toward technological solutions that improve quality and efficiency.

“Industry 4.0 and the industrial IoT (IIoT) are increasing the number of smart sensors at a manufacturing plant and enabling machine-to-machine communications,” said Marina Salaber, Research Analyst, Industrial Practice, Frost & Sullivan. “5G broadband’s capabilities enable connections to numerous devices and simultaneously process large masses of data, addressing the concern about the increasing requirement of data traffic that modern factories need.”

Salaber added: “High reliability allows businesses to incorporate automation processes that depend on the correct network operations. 5G, in this regard, surpasses the boundaries of digitisation, allowing a dependency on network processes and protecting companies from high production costs and stoppages that connection dropouts cause.”