The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) will drive adoption of private 5G networks, some are saying.

In fact, automakers BMW; Daimler, which makes Mercedes vehicles; and Volkswagen have told the German spectrum manager BNA (Federal Network Agency) that they are “interested in operating local 5G networks,” Markus Fasse and Stephan Scheuer wrote in a recent Handelsblatt Global article.

Separately, network equipment vendor Qualcomm says it’s working on 5G NR technologies for private, industrial IoT networks.

“Replacing wired industrial Ethernet for reconfigurable factories with our ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency 5G NR link” can be accomplished, Qualcomm says on its website.

Interestingly, while 5G has been bandied around in the auto industry as being a suitable next-generation radio technology for autonomous vehicles to talk to each other — those self-driving cars will need to share large amounts of data, something 5G promises to deliver — this private use case is as much for the networks within the factories that build the cars.

In-house 5G provisioning will allow enterprises to define their own security implementations rather than trusting mobile network operators (MNOs), Fasse and Scheuer wrote. It will also allow sensitive, proprietary data to stay local.

Qualcomm, too, says there’s a market for the kind of “stringent privacy and security restrictions” that could be delivered by going private, or "local" as it’s sometimes called. Additional advantages include configuring the low-latency technology to tailored and precise, real-time performance requirements — because one isn’t reliant on “interworking with public networks,” Qualcomm explains in a white paper (pdf).