Networking executives from AT&T, Cisco, and Sprint today threw a bucket of cold water reality on the near-term impact of 5G. Their collective assessment of the state of 5G may not be a surprise to most industry observers, but the level of candor on display at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ Edge 2019 conference was a refreshing change from a leading vendor and network operators.

Dan Hays, principal at PwC, set the stage for the panel by highlighting the early stages of 5G against the backdrop of previous network technology evolutions. “What you’ve seen with each of these generations of technology is they’ve largely taken about 10 years to evolve,” he said. “They get introduced; there’s a ramp-up where coverage and service quality improves; and then there’s kind of a soak period where they become prominent and the dominant use in the industry.”

As recently as July, less than 1% of the United States was covered by 5G, and the rate of device penetration was even lower, Hays explained. PwC is tracking progress and by the beginning of 2020 it expects less than 10% of the U.S. population to be covered by 5G and less than 2% of devices in the market will be 5G capable, he added.

5G will eventually, due to higher bandwidth and more responsiveness, enable more diverse data uses and new experiences, Hays said. But those use cases are largely non-existent today.

Take IoT, for example, which is presumably some of the lowest hanging fruit for network operators to leverage on 5G networks. While 5G standards require support for a greater density of connected devices, most IoT devices in the market today don’t require more advanced 5G features.

“I’m a big believer in IoT in a number of ways but to some extent that’s happening now and it’s been happening for 20 years,” said Bob Rodriguez, director of network procurement at Sprint. “On the radio side I think it’s less material, the sensor based-stuff.” Devices or applications that make use of augmented reality or other high-bandwidth requirements will change that but those are mostly exceptions rather than the rule in today’s landscape, he explained.

“[IoT] doesn’t need 5G on the radio side,” Rodriguez added. The development of a true 5G core with capabilities such as network slicing and separating the control plane will provide new operators and IoT vendors with new opportunities, but that won’t reach mass adoption for a few years, he and others on the panel said.

Alp Basol, director of strategy and innovation for industry solutions at AT&T, said it’s that shift in the type of IoT devices that operators are anticipating with enthusiasm. “We’re moving from passive devices that are collecting small amounts of information and then sending that into an analytics engine to the latest generation of IoT devices that are coming out that are permanently power connected — so a traffic light — and they are programmable so they have more intelligence,” he said.

“The IoT commercial industrial environment is really what’s going to drive the marketplace without a doubt, much more than I think in my opinion, than consumer,” Basol said. As such, operators are thinking about and targeting enterprises like never before. He added that 5G is going to be a very high impact technology in enterprises.

“When you start applying that to an enterprise environment there is a vast difference in behavior in applications and performance,” Basol said. In all previous cellular technology evolutions, operators were always talking about speed, he explained.

“It was all speed and that speed was being driven by rich multimedia content and more and more complex applications. Now we’re starting to combine that with reliability because the characteristic of 5G as a programmable network changes the equation,” Basol said. “It’s a native programmable network just in the same way that you’ve been running your data centers for many years and distributing your workloads in a virtualized way, well 5G kind of does that as well. It’s an open system so it’s programmable.”

By leveraging technologies that operate alongside 5G, operators and their enterprise customers will gain access to multi-access edge computing (MEC) in the IP core and that enables function calls and the introduction of more intelligence to non-cellular devices, he said.

“The environment for the enterprise is changing quite dramatically. I think the last time we saw this type of shift was where we moved from Layer 2 enterprise connectivity into a Layer 3 intelligent application networking with intelligent VPNs and MPLS,” Basol added. “Probably since the first time of the advent of the smartphone we’re now seeing 5G technology driving the enterprise further than in consumer. I think that’s the first change that we’re seeing.”

Waris Sagheer, 5G principal product manager at Cisco, said he also anticipates big changes coming to factory automation, robotics, transportation, and utilities, but most of those use cases are still at least a couple years away. It could be 2022 before industrial IoT applications reach factories in a 5G context at scale, he said.

Rodriguez also mentioned a growing interest and opportunity in 5G to partner with enterprises for private networks. “One of the really interesting things about 5G is the way that it allows me to designate services for different types of customers,” he said.

“It’s easy to imagine an Amazon network that runs on top of an AT&T, a Verizon, a Sprint network very simply,” he said. “It’s easy to imagine a campus environment that’s an oil refinery that’s a very big facility running their own networks” that seamlessly hand-off to a commercial operator’s network outside of that location. “It’s going to be a wonderfully interesting change in the way that the world is working as opposed to just four primary carriers,” he said.

Panelists took a more nuanced stance in regards to 5G network security. Because 5G is a packetized technology, security becomes a top concern and it’s going to be one of the key challenges for vendors and operators to work through, according to Sagheer.

Moreover, the risks posed by having less sophisticated infrastructure connecting to networks also provides new attack surfaces for hackers, Rodriguez explained.

“If I connect a nuclear power plant to a 5G grid using X vendor’s radio or Y vendor’s switch and I don’t secure those networks what can happen with that?” he said. “Is it more or less secure than before? No. Are there more things that touch the network? Absolutely.”

Rodriguez also dispelled the relatively blanket notion that 5G is more secure. “I don’t think it’s so much that 5G is more or less inherently secure, technical guys may know different, but as much more things get connected it creates more opportunities for somebody to sneak into something that maybe isn’t ready for primetime,” he said.

Basol concurred with that conclusion. “As you make something programmable and accessible and the density of devices goes up so does the vulnerabilities,” he said. “The persistent threat will always be there.”