IoT challenger announces first Non-Cellular 5G Technology
Wirepas, a Finnish company on a mission to change enterprise IoT, today announces the world’s first purpose-built non-cellular 5G technology, operating on a free global 1.9 GHz spectrum.
The new standard lets any enterprise set up and manage its own network autonomously with no operators anywhere in the world. It also eliminates network infrastructure, equipment, middlemen or subscriptions – at a tenth of the cost in comparison to other market solutions.
This new 5G standard means that for the first time, any business, regardless of size, will finally be able to digitalize their business with world-class, reliable and affordable 5G connectivity. It will allow industries to run their own independent IoT systems and develop new services around their own expertise and business domain. It also enables them to store and consume the data generated in the way they see best fitting for them (on premises, in public cloud or anything in between), democratizing the data ownership.
“Time, complexity, and cost have stood in the way for a wide adoption of 5G IoT. No technology could cost-efficiently connect millions of devices,” said Teppo Hemiä, CEO of Wirepas. “We are paving the way for a true adoption of IoT, beyond cellular solutions – making subscriptions, infrastructure, tower sites and equipment unnecessary. When the technical aspects of using 5G for your IoT systems become plug-and-play, business can instead focus on extracting the value from their solutions, for better decision making and in turn better efficiency.”
A network based on the new standard builds itself and each device is as capable as a regular base station. Combining this decentralized approach with the global, license-free, dedicated 1.9 GHz spectrum means these benefits will become truly mainstream and are easy-to use. The demand for affordable networks is high for businesses looking for scalable, high-density applications in a multitude of areas such as smart meters, building management systems, logistics and smart cities.
More specifically, it will assist in the urbanization, building, and energy consumption in the construction of these smart cities. It also opens opportunities for new use cases, scaling at mass the levels of communication for future. The energy transition from fossil fuels to electricity boost local renewable energy production and consumption market requiring new communication capabilities. This creates a circular economy and allow for the traceability of goods, raw materials and waste.
“We realized a few years back that the current technologies and operation models had difficulties to really digitalize everything. There was a lack of technologies supporting autonomous operations, having state of the art radio performance and being future proof to enable capacity and performance improvements. We already have a product, Wirepas Massive, that can solve many of the IoT problems. Now we have standardized that technology and are developing a product, Wirepas Private 5G, for even more demanding applications. This is a natural evolution of our technology,” says Teppo Hemiä, CEO at Wirepas.
Wirepas has been the key contributor in developing the new standard, currently called DECT-2020 NR, owned by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). The standard was published last year and is on its way to be included in the 5G standard in October 2021.
Wirepas will closely monitor the market feedback on the standard and provide updates on usage, implementation and use cases.
