Which two IoT use cases require the low latency and high reliability that 5G networks provide?

Smart home devices such as thermostats, lighting, and speakers can tolerate higher latency and do not require the ultra-low latency or high-reliability guarantees of 5G - standard Wi-Fi or LTE is sufficient for these use cases.

Automotive IoT applications such as autonomous vehicle control and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication require sub-millisecond latency and carrier-grade reliability for real-time safety decisions and collision avoidance. These functions cannot tolerate the latency variance of 4G/LTE, making 5G's Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) profile a hard requirement.

Health and wellness IoT applications such as remote surgery and real-time critical patient monitoring require both extremely low latency and very high reliability, as even minor delays can have life-threatening consequences. 5G's URLLC capabilities provide the guaranteed QoS levels necessary to support these mission-critical medical IoT deployments.

Smart city applications such as traffic management and environmental monitoring generally tolerate latency in the hundreds of milliseconds range and do not require the stringent low-latency guarantees that 5G provides.

Sports and fitness wearables track biometrics and activity data that have no mission-critical real-time latency requirements and function effectively over standard wireless networks such as Bluetooth or LTE.