According to TCCA, the paper recommends, amongst other things, the 'top ten' areas to take into account by utilities planning to migrate their machine-to-machine effort to 4G, 5G, LoRa or Sigfox.

Speaking of the document, a spokesperson said: “As next generation networks become more widespread, there is increasing interest from the utilities sector in features that are targeted at IoT telemetry-type applications. For 5G, ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), network slicing, and support for large densities of connected devices are just some of the attractions.” 

Working group chair, Mason Advisory’s Nick Smye, said: “There is a perception that moving to a new technology bearer is a necessary upgrade that will deliver a faster service. However, for M2M communications, mission critical capability isn’t simply about speed.” 

He continued: “Risk of obsolescence, network resilience, priority and pre-emption are all critical features for mission critical utility applications. It will be some time before 5G networks provide the required level of resilience, coverage, [and priority/pre-emption]."

TCCA White-paper free download