Verizon and GE’s technical development arm are teaming up on a 5G-equipped laboratory design to find new ways to put the next generation of wireless services to use in industrial settings.
The collaboration, which will consist of a test bed at GE’s upstate New York research headquarters, will initially focus on innovating around three staples of the industrial giant’s business: Aviation, healthcare and energy. The move is the latest in a series of similar deals from Verizon built around fleshing out new enterprise markets for 5G, including a collaboration with Honda on autonomous cars and a partnership with IBM around edge computing.
Top line
Verizon claims that its 5G Ultraband service can now reach speeds up to 10 times faster than 4G connections under ideal conditions. The carrier is hoping that speed and the network’s low latency will make wireless service feasible for the first time across a host of industrial uses, from coordinating smart city power grids to mixed-reality medical imaging.
“The superior network speed and capacity of 5G networks will allow us to take full advantage of a multitude of digital technologies to transform industrial assets and operations,” SM Hasan, GE Research’s 5G mission leader said in a statement. “From AI and machine learning to digital twins and autonomous technologies, 5G can accelerate the path to everything from self-driving cars and digital health to more resilient, reliable energy grids powered by more carbon-free energy assets like intelligent wind farms.”
Some examples of applications that GE hopes to test at the new site include sensor-enabled wind farms that can harvest real-time data about each turbine; jet engine monitoring that can provide critical information and enable virtual repairs; and a unified system of monitoring medical symptoms across each stage of a patient’s journey through a hospital.
Between the lines
While 5G is beginning to gain traction on the consumer side thanks to milestones like the iPhone 12, some cell carriers and analysts expect that the new commercial use cases opened up by 5G will eventually allow the enterprise market to eclipse the subscriber business entirely. Collaborations like these are key to Verizon’s strategy of carving out these markets early and establishing itself as a hub for partners across a variety of industries, from media and entertainment to healthcare and energy.
Bottom line
With low latency, high speeds and the ability to handle many more simultaneous connections than previous network generations, 5G could prove transformative for the way industry runs across many different sectors. Partnerships like these are just the beginning of carriers’ attempts to shape that change.
