The tech isn’t the story (silly!), says Siemens; it is part of an answer, in fact – similar to IoT, and similar to AI. Industrial enterprises have their very own issues, and don’t purchase the hype anyway; however generally private 5G helps – and they also name their crane provider (and so on), and never their telco.
In sum – what to know:
Higher uptake – Industry 4.0 curiosity in private 5G is rising, says Siemens – however it’s slower and extra use-case pushed than distributors first imagined; the silver-bullet pitch is a troublesome promote.
Enabling tech – Enterprises don’t wish to speak about tech, and don’t typically purchase the large tech imaginative and prescient; Siemens says private 5G works finest as an enabler, embedded in automation options
Ready channels – Siemens is promoting 5G to current enterprise and OEM prospects (quantity unknown) through its current gross sales groups – and never pitching a top-down panacea like a telco.
Maybe I’m imagining it, however Siemens appears happier with its luck in the private 5G market – spring 2026, a gathering at MWC, versus a 12 months in the past, identical place, with a obscure reminiscence of some uncertainty. “It is seriously picking up, but in a different way than we expected.” A few fast factors for context: one, the private 5G market continues to be arduous work, clearly, and far more durable than it was speculated to be; two (and associated), Nokia’s pending exit, as a gross sales operation a minimum of, casts a fair more durable mild. But regardless of this, the message from Siemens, an Industrie 4.0 aristocrat, is that there are causes to be cheerful – that prospects have issues, and 5G helps generally with options for them.
The quote about the pick-up is from Daniel Mai, accountable for industrial wi-fi at Siemens, and a well-recognized in these pages. He suggests RCR wanders over to the Qualcomm sales space in Hall 3 at MWC to see an autonomous manufacturing demo, additionally with Palo Alto Networks. “It combines physical AI, generative AI, on-prem LLM, on-prem 5G; there are none of these dancing robots you see here. Instead, it shows how these technologies bring value in combination, based on existing products. 5G is not the main topic. It is just an enabler; a part of the solution. Which is what we said all along. But it enables really advanced technology solutions – which are practical, and available off the shelf.”
So whether it is the identical as Siemens all the time mentioned – that 5G is the help act, not the hero – then what’s the plot-twist? How has the narrative diverged, away from the cowl story, as perceived when it picked up this 5G saga in 2022? “It is not about IT/OT and AI, just yet. It is still about basic use cases. Industries that have real connectivity problems and expensive critical assets are looking at this,” says Mai.
Which is, regardless of its shock, how Siemens has pitched private 5G for 12 months, a minimum of; curiously, it additionally describes how the vendor market has pivoted, even over an extended interval, to current enterprise options for enterprise issues and so on – quite than simply shiny tech, whether or not 5G or AI or IoT.
The IoT trade has recognized this for ages; the 5G trade is simply discovering it out; the AI market must study for itself. Seeing is believing, and all of that – particularly for enterprises, extra so for industrial ones. “Because they have different KPIs,” says Mai. “Which are not about adopting technology for the sake of it. They run critical operations, based on production and reliability targets. That is the yardstick, whatever it takes. New technology is always slow.” (The query for the AI trade – promoting yet one more “enabling tech”, albeit a richly layered one that may drive IoT and 5G in addition to – is how briskly the penny drops for gross sales groups, or else how a lot the hype will get to enterprises.
Neither is the impetus in Industry 4.0 about the gnarly IT/OT integration to digitise operations – to automate or autonomize. The different grand irony, in fact, is that ‘physical AI’ is all of the sudden a factor – as if any form of linked semi-autonomous robotic, a mainstay use-case for private 5G gross sales, received’t work without a line, lengthy or brief, into an Nvidia GPU someplace. Clearly, this isn’t the case: as Mai says, the demo in Hall 3 is ‘physical AI’, acquainted in Industry 4.0 case research from 5G distributors, and completely viable with frequent elements; the distinction is it engages an on-prem LLM so the robotic arm (atop a robotic AGV in the demo) can take conversational instruction. And it’s whizzy.
Real industrial demand
But the slight revelation, between the method private 5G was bought and the method it’s purchased, is simply that OT departments in industrial enterprises nonetheless want a hard-noised KPI-based rationale, which hyperlinks to their domains – plus proof that it really works. Mai says: “The way 5G was pitched 5G was as infrastructure to take care of pretty much everything – so you can add AI based on its latency and bandwidth. But there was no big-demand. Because these OT-types don’t see the big vision. Some do; and some bought 5G in the early days, and found it didn’t meet their expectations. Things have changed; the adoption rate is higher. But the demand needs to be created, based on use cases and applications.”
Funny, you’d suppose Siemens, skilled and pragmatic, would know higher (than anybody) than to have interaction industrial corporations in gross sales discussions about fluffy tech; in all probability, Mai is talking extra about basic advertising of private 5G in Industry 4.0, extra seen on the MWC showfloor in Barcelona final 12 months. But it’s fascinating to listen to Siemens say it. The agency has a well-circulated 5G reference case with Germany-based producer Salzgitter, one in every of the largest metal producers in Europe (seven million tonnes per 12 months). Salzgitter got here to attach its AGVs (“like pretty much all customers start with”), to move heavy metal slabs between storage places and beam furnaces.
It is a tough job. “They don’t stack equally,” says Mai. They are red-hot on their return, from the fiery furnace to the rolling mill and the slicing line. “We use machine learning and machine vision so the system identifies the slabs, and stacks them and moves them. But their first question was: can we build redundancy? Because if it goes down, everything goes down. The financial impact if the process stops is far greater than buying a second system – whatever we do for redundancy. It is the key part to keep production moving. It cannot afford a single point of failure.” (I imply, ‘mission-critical’ is relative, proper – telco distributors versus enterprise consumers; memo to Nokia et al.)
So right here is the use case to swing the enterprise case – and the method it now rolls in private 5G (in Industry 4.0), says Siemens. Salzgitter has since expanded its 5G system to accommodate a second main “critical” use case: to automate its cranes. “Again, it is one of its most critical assets,” explains Mai. “It wants to fully-automate for various reasons: mainly, because it’s difficult work, and people don’t want to do it. It is an emotional topic.” The setup is analogous: digital camera imaginative and prescient sensors, private 5G community, upgraded crane electronics; sorting metal slabs in the yard to place onto a conveyor, at hand over to the AGV. “More or less, [both together] represent its entire production chain.”
Cranes and management rooms
But grasp on; haven’t we moved past use-case deployments in manufacturing unit cubby-holes? RCR wrote some weeks ago that US-headquartered course of manufacturing big Cargill, now with 50 private 5G networks, thinks such an strategy is wrongheaded. Forget use instances, it mentioned; since you mild up a nook of a manufacturing unit, and it by no means works for anything – and the momentum falters. The new Cargill mannequin says to belief the tech, and the want for it; put the community in, and watch the use instances multiply. “Yes, that is right; Cargill is right, too. But the point is to serve the customer, and solve the problem,” responds Mai.
“It depends who’s driving it – which is not IT, because IT sticks to what it knows. Automotive, say, doesn’t have IT and OT; it has a joint department with clear direction to support OT use cases. So IT is not pushing OT to meet its own needs and standards. It sees things from both angles, focused on OT. Which might also be the Cargill approach – to identify the [broader] value the infrastructure brings. But the other way is that [OT] has a problem, with one use case: crane automation, say. And so you focus on that, and take baby steps between. And then it says, ‘well, we have a warehouse, as well, and the Wi-Fi is shitty.” Hence the level at the begin about OT KPIs, as the dialog starter.
So identical as Cargill then; simply the vendor view, going into totally different enterprises in several industries – with totally different issues, agendas, cultures, budgets. More apparently, maybe, is the Siemens setup; the agency’s crane division is promoting remote-controlled crane automation (SIMOCRANE RCOS) with its 5G system – to crane OEMs and operators. “You basically remove the cabin on top and put it somewhere more convenient – and control a fleet of them with a couple of joysticks from a comfy chair. But not every crane has a fiber optic cable to it, the fiber breaks because the crane moves, and Wi-Fi is not made for those distances. And 5G ticks all the boxes,” says Mai.
“Deterministic comms for video and CCTV, safety traffic; industrial protocols like PROFINET and PROFIsafe – all running in parallel with time-critical control. These ship-to-shore cranes [on ports] are €15 million each. So a 5G system – licensed spectrum, better coverage, traffic prioritization – is not much [by comparison].” What occurs when the cranes are bought into ports with Nokia or Ericsson techniques? “Yes, that could be a problem. But some prospects have struggled with time-critical visitors, and an end-to-end system is finest for reliability. So you in all probability put in a second system – which fits in opposition to the 5G precept, one infrastructure for every part, however it’s simply too crucial.
Churn under the floor
Plus, in fact, the ports sector was a primary adopter of private 5G (when it was nonetheless private LTE), so a substantial 4G base (largely Nokia’s) will likely be up for renewal anyway. But what number of cranes are being bought and upgraded? How many cranes are there? This doesn’t sound like a mass-market bump. “No, but digitization is important for these guys – for safety and productivity; to attract staff. With this, a single operator can be in charge of multiple cranes – without going between. And the electrification [componentry] of a crane is replaced every 10 or 15 years. Not many ports are being built, but there is lots of refurbishment, and the crane industry is way bigger than you think.”
Of course, that is the complete distinction with Siemens. It isn’t an enterprise buyer like Cargill or Salzgitter, clearly, with a single kind of enterprise downside and a fragmented multiplicity of potential tech options. Except that is simplistic, in fact: Siemens is a producer as properly, with a bunch of factories (together with in Karlsruhe, the place it put 5G by means of its paces), and Cargill and Salzgitter face totally different challenges in several vegetation in several jurisdictions. But equally, Siemens isn’t a telco vendor like Nokia or Ericsson in the industrial 5G market: 5G is an add-on for the German agency, to its ‘digital industries’ play – to increase its options and deepen its gross sales.
Nokia is getting out of private (campus) 5G as a result of Industry 4.0 is simply too arduous; Siemens is moving into it as a result of private 5G makes Industry 4.0 simpler. It doesn’t must construct (or justify) new gross sales groups; it already has them, and so they already know their prospects’ companies. Where it really works (which isn’t in all places), private 5G is a confirmed repair for industrial automation challenges in harsh work environments. As it stands, the firm’s technique with private 5G isn’t actually about driving new enterprise, however about extending and deepening its current ties. Something like that? “Salzgitter had the vision, proved the vision, and went to the next evolutionary step,” responds Mai.
“But most enterprises are old fashioned, or don’t see the vision, or don’t see beyond their own tasks and operations. They don’t adopt technology for the sake of it; they have KPIs, and so 5G is an enabling technology for a crane. But there is a lot of movement out there – old systems, new requirements; the whole AI story. Enterprises need to collect data in the field. They need connectivity. Whether it is wireless LAN or private 5G just depends on the case. But the need is there – to digitalize and innovate. 5G is just an enabler to make it work.”
Robots, robots, robots
RCR wanders over to the Qualcomm stand in Hall 3, and instructs an on-prem LLM on a private 5G channel to move a message (which could be in any language) to an AMR in a manufacturing cell to construct a traditional robotic toy in purple and inexperienced. The AMR considers its pile of appendages, and a message comes again through the LLM interface (“on-prem, not in the cloud somewhere; another tick box” – we might have a-whole-nother dialogue) that it’s out of purple arms, and desires to know if blue will do; and so the textual content instruction is returned, two robotic arms choose the elements, and switch them to a tray on a cell AGV, which wheels about the place like a mannequin intralogistic system whereas two extra robots arms on prime of it assemble a pint-sized automation – in blue and inexperienced, with yellow boots.
