Industry 4.0 - A True Revolution
June 21, 2022
By Stephen Bye, Executive Vice President & Chief Commercial Officer, DISH Wireless
What is “Industry 4.0”? Is it a set of inventions and technologies? Is it a new way of looking at capabilities and opportunities?
When we think of previous industrial revolutions, the defining features weren’t just improvements on ways of doing things or incremental boosts to the economy - they were literally revolutions. The introduction of the steam engine changed manufacturing processes, influenced social and cultural development and created entirely new industries that hadn’t existed before. Similarly, electricity and mass production and the introduction of the microchip and digital computing completely altered civilization. Beyond just the material or the physical inventions, those revolutions also introduced new ways of thinking, new mindsets that are the real drivers of innovation.
Industry 4.0 includes new technologies, things like fifth generation wireless and artificial intelligence (AI), but also Open RAN architecture, edge computing, elastic storage and cloud-native networking that DISH have embraced as essential to our strategy. These capabilities don’t just improve upon 4G or legacy systems, they open new fields of innovation and possibilities that, quite frankly, we couldn’t imagine even a few years ago.
Looking at Industry 4.0 as a mindset and strategy is a differentiator. This is not just faster upload and download speeds, lower latency or wider coverage - that’s all part of it, but the enterprises that DISH works with and supports, the entrepreneurs who can adapt to and adopt these capabilities will be the ones who separate from the pack by identifying and creating entirely new fields with entirely new capabilities.
DISH can come up with new use cases or potential verticals all day long, but for every scenario we, as the network provider, can imagine - autonomous mining systems; efficient agricultural operations; factories employing artificial intelligence and machine learning - there are hundreds of thousands of more opportunities that enterprise users, the ones leveraging our secure connectivity, engineering resources and operations expertise, will be able to make.
We have the advantage to support this kind of creativity with assets like 5G, Open RAN, intrinsically secure connectivity, edge computing and cloud-native principles. But most importantly, we have an approach that looks at both sides of the equation - what we bring to the table and what the user wants to achieve.
This is an exciting time, when technology is finally catching up to our imaginations. Things that were inconceivable just a few years ago are within sight, and DISH is ready to lead the way.