What’s the next logical step for an IoT Control Center operating at scale across 3G and 4G with 160M SIMs under management and 60 million connected cars? Adding 5G to the mix.

Vikas Butaney, vice president product management IoT at Cisco, said that non-standalone 5G will come first and then 5G standalone service will make it easier for companies to manage these connections and the data generated from them.

Customers can use the control center platform to manage a diverse range of data from smart meters to connected cars. Given the vast amount of data generated daily from these sources and the changing landscape of IoT, fixed policy rules with human processing of data is no longer a scalable approach, Butaney said.
“Leveraging machine learning opens up opportunities to look for specific patterns or to find new patterns that may have operational, security or financial implications,” he said.

SEE: 5G: What it means for IoT (free PDF)

The Control Center allows customers to manage multiple services through one platform. Butaney said one of Cisco’s transportation customers wanted to bring a connected bus experience to riders while also enabling advanced dispatching, security surveillance, GPS and maintenance services to the municipalities that run them.

“They combined our Cisco IoT Control Center platform with Cisco’s ruggedized gateways and Kinetic Gateway Management Module to weave together an overall connected solution that was simple to deploy and manage at scale with reduced IT staff,” he said.

Butaney said he thinks industries where mobility is central to their business model will have the most to gain from the new control center, including transportation companies and utilities as well as smart cities and oil and gas companies.

Cisco partners ExRobotics and Astus explained how this new connectivity and management service will enable new IoT use cases for their customers. ExRobotics sells robots for unmanned industrial facilities. The company said in a press release that the low latency of 5G will allow robots to react to an operator’s commands more quickly.

Astus builds software and hardware for fleet management, including car sharing companies. The company will use the machine learning component of the IoT Control Center to automate data analysis. This will free up staff time to chase down security threats or malfunctions.

Industrial environments can benefit from the advanced IoT use cases made possible with 5G connectivity. The Cisco IoT Control Center now has these capabilities:

  • Machine learning for better management: The platform analyzes 3 billion events every day to identify anomalies and improve endpoint security and control.
  • Smart billing: Service providers can use this feature to optimize rate plans and send customer notifications when consumption levels change.
  • eSIM as a service: This functionality provides reliable, cost-effective SIM handoffs between service providers, a requirement in global supply chains.

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