IoT-ready network

5G and IoT were made for each other—literally. A significant amount of functionality is being included in the 5G specifications to support IoT. Everything from air interface standards for reach and power considerations to density of devices per square km to extremely low latency for delay sensitive applications are included. And the good news is, IoT deployments are anticipated to scale massively, with some analysts predicting 20 to 30 billion IoT devices in the network by 2020.

Managing this growth requires communications service providers to have complete visibility over how their networks are operating—in real-time and with near 100 % coverage. To do this requires a new way of working, including building service assurance into the service definition and having analytics-driven automation to address the scale of services being deployed and managed.