Telecom marketing, advertising and innovation

In connected factories, geolocation enables the tracking and management of assets like vehicles, containers, and equipment, providing real-time location data, geofencing, and analytics to optimize asset utilization and logistics.

Insurance telematics leverages geolocation to offer usage-based insurance premiums based on driving habits, ensuring accurate data through SIM cards or mobile phones.

Connected drones utilize 5G's centimeter-level positioning accuracy to confirm drone locations within authorized air corridors, with Vodafone developing drone services, including a drone coverage API and location services, to help operators plan flight paths and comply with regulations.

One significant opportunity for CSPs lies in private 5G networks, which greatly improves accuracy, response time, positioning, and control of IoT devices compared to GPS and Wi-Fi. These improvements are critical for applications that require real-time processing and rapid response –autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and augmented reality (AR), for example. For many years, GPS has been used to deliver geolocation capabilities in industrial applications, pinpointing a device’s position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. But GPS is limited because it only works outdoors and suffers from high latency. 5G geolocation cuts latency to a millisecond and can track a device with an accuracy of 1 meter or less. Indeed, if a factory or port has a high density of 5G cell sites, accuracy of 30 centimeters is possible.

5G private networks can also support a higher number of connected devices within a given area, and the networks are more secure than Wi-Fi networks, which require passwords.

Another advantage of private 5G over Wi-Fi is that its availability indoors and outdoors ensures continuity of coverage. These features give enterprises more control over who has access to the network.

By implementing 5G network slicing, CSPs can support multiple virtual networks with very different characteristics using the same physical infrastructure. So, if an enterprise requires multiple slices for different applications (for example, machine-to-machine communications for tracking IoT devices and ultra-reliable, low-latency communications for a mission-critical application like robotics), CSPs can tailor solutions to meet performance, security, and reliability requirements.

5G SA can have an even greater impact when operators leverage advanced technologies like beamforming, multi-cell round-trip time (RTT), and millimeter waves to locate devices more accurately. The technology also empowers mobile operators to open their network infrastructure to developers through APIs using the Network Exposure Function (NEF). This enables new network-as-a-service and network-as-a-platform offers, which can lead to revenue growth.