How could 5G improve your IoT device's data processing and response times?

5G enhances IoT devices' data processing and response times through several key improvements: 1. Increased Bandwidth: Enables faster data transfer rates, essential for real-time processing. 2. Lower Latency: Reduces delay to as low as 1 millisecond, crucial for immediate responses in critical applications. 3. Enhanced Reliability: Provides stable connectivity, ensuring continuous monitoring and prompt responses. 4. Network Slicing: Customizes network resources for specific needs, optimizing performance. 5. Edge Computing Integration: Reduces latency by processing data closer to the source. 6. Massive Device Connectivity: Supports more devices simultaneously, improving efficiency and reducing response times.

5G is an umbrella for many individual techniques. Most well known are the high speed and low latency variants, especially within 5G SA (Stand Alone). Many IoT devices however will benefit from the LPWA techniques that were founded under the 4G umbrella but were upgraded under the 5G umbrella. These techniques are known as LTE Cat-M1 or LTE-M and LTE Cat-NB1/2 or NB-IoT. The focus with these techniques are: 1. Low power: both are suitable for battery powered devices. 2. Long range: by reducing bandwith and latency there is more room for redundancy and thus a better link budget. This increases indoor coverage. Because LTE-M and NB-IoT are also in 5G they will be available for a longer time than LTE Cat 1 and LTE Cat 1bis.

In my opinion there are few use-cases that actually benefit from these speed increases. Industrial sensors and smart home appliances will work fine on lower link speeds. When low latency is required in industrial processes private 5G could be an option but I think the market for that is very small. Whenever possible industry will choose wired solutions for critical infrastructure. From a device engineering standpoint I believe that AI at the edge will even decrease the need for speed. To give an example: it is better to use a camera for people counting that does the image processing on device and only transmitting the count instead of transmitting the video feed and processing it in the cloud.

Edge computing is very important in IoT but it is a completely separate concept from 5G. Because silicon becomes more powerful every day it now becomes possible to run AI algorithms on the edge instead of in the cloud. This concept leads to significant power and bandwidth reduction as only the results of the algorithm needs to be transmitted. This becomes very visible with high bandwidth inputs such as cameras, vibration sensors, microphones, ...