The same month, ChinaвЂ™s Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Liu Liehong had said that 5G standalone networks served all of the countryвЂ™s prefecture-level cities (with more than 250,000 people).

Photo: AFP / Nicolas AsfouriДЄmericaвЂ™s Federal Communication Commission (FCC) auctioned US$81 billion worth of spectrum for telecom companiesвЂ™ provision of 5G broadband last February, a first step towards a national 5G buildout. Regulatory issues, including the allocation of radio spectrum to 5G applications, are a leading concern for prospective investors in 5G networks.Д¬hinese telecom giant Huawei features a red sticker reading вЂњ5GвЂќ in Beijing. But the Western competition remains in proof-of-concept territory, while China is deploying 5G productivity applications in depth. Other Western companies, including IBM and Cisco, are marketing 5G enterprise solutions aggressively. Expectations are running high for the potential of 5G wireless communication for industrial applications.вЂќ The German industrial giant Siemens announced on its website, вЂњThe company has set another milestone on the path to Industrial 5G at its own Automotive Showroom and Test Center in Nuremberg, Germany: a private standalone 5G network in an industrial environment that is based exclusively on Siemens prototypes. HuaweiвЂ™s Western competitors have also bet heavily on вЂњIndustry 4.0.вЂќ The Finnish telecom equipment manufacturer Nokia, now number three in global sales after Huawei and Ericsson, wrote on its website, вЂњCritical communications solutions based on industrial-grade private wireless offer unimaginable possibilities to power Industry 4.0 use cases, from machine remote control, to cloud robotics, process automation, predictive asset maintenance, assisted/autonomous vehicles, CCTV monitoring and mission-critical push-to-talk and push-to-video - all on a single network infrastructure.вЂќ Industry skeptics, though, point to several high hurdles before such gains can be realized, including high upfront investment costs, turf wars between telecom companies and technology solutions companies, fragmented technological standards and regulatory uncertainty. The country or countries that learn to transform other industries with AI and Big Data will dominate the 21 st century. The IT revolution had minimal impact on productivity in other sectors. Total factor productivity growth (see chart at bottom) has tapered out in all the major industrial economies.

What its promoters call вЂњIndustry 4.0вЂќ promises to solve the great economic policy problem of the past three decades, namely stagnant productivity.

Project red buffer gate