• 5G RedCap offers great potential for the IoT product and services sector
• The lower-cost, more efficient version of 5G has gained particular traction across Asia
• But a Vodafone Business executive urges the industry to have patience, telling the Great Telco Debate 2024 audience that it will take some time for RedCap to find its place in the IoT ecosystem 

Despite widespread expectation that 5G would help to accelerate uptake of internet of things (IoT) applications, encompassing everything from low bandwidth monitoring connections to persistent video surveillance, it hasn’t yet made much of an impact. But 5G RedCap (reduced capability) might still save the day and there are signs it is featuring in many telco strategies, particularly across Asia. 

As a reminder, RedCap is a fully fledged 5G standard (having been included in the 3GPP Release 17 specifications) and, in essence, is a more cost- and energy-efficient version of 5G that is well suited to IoT, as it offers more bandwidth than low-speed wide area network solutions but without the need to deploy ‘full fat’ 5G – see RedCap puts a spring into IoT’s 5G step.

For a vast array of network applications, conventional 5G tends to drive the same expensive device electronics and battery power requirement, even when its full capability is not being harnessed – especially in the IoT domain – so telcos, chip and device vendors and standards bodies are looking at how 5G might be adapted for less demanding, but still important, use cases. This is where RedCap comes in by promising 5G a role for a wide range of IoT applications, from low-powered wearables with undemanding data communications requirements, right up to video surveillance and heavy industrial process control applications.

Commercial IoT products based on 5G RedCap have been available for about a year, so it’s still early days, and the provision of RedCap applications requires the supporting service provider to have a 5G standalone (SA) network up and running. The rollout of 5G SA has been slower than expected in many markets, but expectations are high (as they always are for anything related to 5G). 

Currently, 5G RedCap appears to be gaining the most traction in Asia, where about half the technology’s current deployments and trials are taking place. All three of China’s huge operators – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – have already deployed RedCap to offer commercial services, while in Malaysia, Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), the wholesale 5G network, has conducted a successful trial with Ericsson software on 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands. 

In Australia, Optus has collaborated with Ericsson, Qualcomm and Speedshield Technologies to integrate 5G RedCap technology with AI-powered camera systems. According to the operator, this allows applications, such as Speedshield’s AiVA (Artificial Intelligence Vision Assist) Pedestrian Detection System to leverage the full benefits of 5G connectivity.

In Thailand, Advanced Info Service (AIS) validated RedCap on 2.6GHz spectrum with ZTE and MediaTek, and has conducted separate tests with Huawei, showing that the tech is suited to multiple spectrum bands.  

Also prominent in the Asian RedCap lineup is South Korea’s SK Telecom, which has been testing RedCap in collaboration with Nokia and MediaTek.

Elsewhere, e& United Arab Emirates (UAE) has conducted a successful end-to-end verification of RedCap on its 5G standalone (5G SA) network with Ericsson, “expanding the ecosystem for new types of devices that can be connected to 5G,” noted the partners.

And in North America, T-Mobile US recently announced the commercial availability of a connectivity device that enables laptops and tablets, for example, to connect to its network via a RedCap connection. The operator noted that RedCap is “a game-changer for people seeking an affordable entry point into 5G with a more reliable, more secure and faster experience compared to Wi-Fi and 4G LTE.”

And now RedCap is starting to play a role in the fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband services sector: In the Philippines, Dito Telecommunity, with technology from Huawei, launched a FWA service using 5G RedCap in October.

But wait – there’s more! If RedCap has value, how about a RedCap on steroids? Enter eRedCap (enhanced reduced capability), which was introduced in 3GPP Release 18 and which allows for further reduced complexity and cost: It is considered as a replacement for 4G LTE Category 1 IoT technology, which has been widely deployed, and suitable for use cases such as smartwatches,  medical and industrial monitoring and automotive IoT, including vehicle-to-everything (V2X). 

What does this mean for the market? According to the analyst team at Omdia, by 2030 there will be more than 2.1 billion 5G IoT connections worldwide, of which 963.5 million will be 5G RedCap (compared with a very low base right now). The growth expected over the next five years highlights “the growing influence of 5G technology on IoT (internet of things) use cases, as well as the industry’s increasing readiness for RedCap and eRedCap solutions,” according to Omdia. 

But it might be a while before the 5G RedCap services and technology sector gains real scale because there’s a significant time lag between standards being set and commercial uptake, noted Phil Skipper, head of business development for IoT at Vodafone Business. 

Speaking at the recent Great Telco Debate 2024 in London, Skipper noted that the IoT sector’s uptake of new technology is not linear but is more like a pulse. “That’s because every time you [shift from one generation to another] there’s a whole bunch of stuff that has to happen. People need to set the standard, build modules, and then somebody has to design that module into a new product and then that new product has to come to market – then it comes to market in one country and then they expand it into others, and so on. 

“For every step in a ‘G’ you introduce a lag into the process. And I think a good example is NB IoT [narrowband internet of things] – we rolled it out and then it took us probably 18 months to two years for the first [vendor] products to come off the production line at any scale. So I think the market is much more stepped than it is linear and that makes it harder to predict. I think we’re just about to see the same with 5G and 5G RedCap… the standard is out but the delay between signing off on the standard and kit coming to market is actually quite long.” 

Skipper isn’t concerned, though. “We now run our IoT business as a standalone organisation… we believe it's got a fantastic future,” he added. 

You can view the full Great Telco Debate session, Will 5G fuel the renaissance of telco IoT?, on demand right now! 

– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV