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A new standard bearer for enterprise 5G IoT from Wirepas?

Purpose-built 5G standard developed by Finnish company to run autonomous networks

Finnish IoT connectivity specialist Wirepas has launched what it claims is 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.”

According to the company, the 5G standard will enable enterprises of any sizes to digitise their business with “world-class, reliable and affordable” 5G connectivity, and allow industries to run their own independent IoT systems, develop new services around their own expertise and business domain, and to store and access data in the most effective way (on-premise, public cloud, hybrid, etc).

“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.”

The company says that demand for affordable networks is high, with businesses looking for scalable, high-density applications in areas such as smart meters, building management systems, logistics and smart cities. “We realised a few years back that the current technologies and operation models had difficulties to really digitalise everything,” Hemiä continued.

“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 standardised that technology and are developing a product, Wirepas Private 5G, for even more demanding applications. This is a natural evolution of our technology.”

Wirepas says it has been the key contributor in developing the new standard (DECT-2020 NR), which is 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.