Since steam powered the Industrial Revolution in 1760, revolutionizing farms, manufacturing, and transportation, a steady evolution has taken place in every industry. Electricity improved production, the telegraph sped up communication, and computers eventually changed everything. 

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Today, the evolution of industry, or industry 4.0, continues to improve efficiency and productivity with technologies like autonomous machines, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and video surveillance, to name a few. Moving large amounts of data, these technologies depend on high-speed connectivity, driving the need for solutions that offer high bandwidth and low latency. Optical fibre networks offer the best connectivity, bringing Gigabit and multi-Gigabit broadband to enterprises.

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For enterprises, these speeds have unmistakable benefits that are critical to business success: efficiency, productivity, reduced costs, and improved security. Moreover, optical fibre creates mission-critical networks that bring unmatched reliability to enterprises across all verticals, from factories to university campuses to warehouses and rural industry. Increasingly important, fibre enables other layers in the architecture that are essential for connectivity, especially in rural or remote areas where connecting fibre is challenging or costly.

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LTE and 5G radios that connect wireless devices—such as IoT devices, mobile devices, sensors, and more—rely on mid-mile fibre access for connectivity. Today, an architecture built on mid-mile fibre with a last-mile wireless overlay using radios creates a network that delivers speeds up to 500Mbps. 

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In the future, these networks will deliver up to 1Gbps while becoming less costly and more efficient to deploy. The continued evolution of fibre and radio technology, purpose-built solutions, and applications makes these networks future-proof and ensures that enterprises that invest in them are well-positioned to achieve their goals efficiently and effectively.  

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As a designer, architect, and operator of networks combining fibre access and radio technology, MOBIA has seen first-hand how they enable industry 4.0 to move large amounts of data and make use of innovative industrial technologies. This has proven to be especially true in rural industry, where connectivity is crucial and fibre-to-premise deployments remain costly and challenging. In these cases, combining fibre access with a wireless overlay can lower deployment costs by 50% or more while improving operational reliability and increasing ROI. These technologies have also proven to be more secure and energy efficient. In our experience, the benefits of effectively designed and operated fibre and radio networks are indisputable.

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