Tech
Some 87% of enterprises see private wireless, edge ROI in a year | Computer Weekly

Artificial intelligence (AI) and private networks have helped elevate industrial networking, yet research from Nokia has found that AI’s potential in industrial settings hinges on access to high-quality, real-time data, while on-premise edge and private wireless are key to unlocking AI’s potential in complex industrial environments.
Nokia’s 2025 Industrial digitalisation report drew on insights from 115 industrial enterprises in manufacturing, energy, logistics, mining and transportation in Australia, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US.
Among the key findings of the study was that as many as 87% of on-premise edge and private network adopters are seeing a return on investment in just one year while enabling AI-driven use cases. In addition, 81% of industrial enterprises found setup costs lower, with over half saving at least 11%. Ongoing costs also dropped for 86% of companies, with 60% reporting savings of at least 11%.
Virtually all industrial enterprises were found to have deployed on-premise edge technology alongside private wireless. This combination said Nokia was enabling secure, low-latency connectivity in complex environments and pervasive sensor coverage, even in hard-to-reach areas, supporting AI-driven use cases such as predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring and digital twins in 70% of surveyed enterprises.
The study also highlighted how operational performance improvements driven by private wireless networks are supporting sustainability goals. Some 94% of the surveyed industrial enterprises reported a reduction in carbon emissions, with 41% achieving decreases of more than 20%, and 89% seeing energy savings. These gains were being amplified by predictive maintenance, connected devices and drones that cut fuel-intensive travel and enable more accurate, real-time emissions tracking.
Beyond environmental impact, 71% of surveyed companies were found to be actively deploying connected worker tools such as automated alarms, AI-assisted monitoring and geofencing solutions to reduce accidents and strengthen worker safety.
Nokia suggested that connected devices streamline tasks by reducing the need to move for signal and simplifying access to information. They also cut paperwork and minimise human error, boosting efficiency on-site, and automation.
Not surprisingly, security remained a top priority, with 57% of respondents identifying cyber security as a driver to deploy an industrial edge platform powered by a private wireless network. Nokia noted that its private wireless solutions offer built-in encryption, physical network separation and compatibility with zero-trust frameworks, making them ideal for mission-critical infrastructure while maintaining business continuity and compliance.
The study was conducted by GlobalData. Assessing the trends revealed in the study, the company’s research director Gary Barton said: “Industrial enterprises are turning to private wireless and on-premise edge to drive innovation and industrial transformation.
“These deployments are delivering a clear return on investment and enabling use cases that would not otherwise have been possible. Private wireless and edge have helped enterprises to improve worker safety, support sustainability and create a delivery platform for AI-powered solutions such as process automation and predictive maintenance.”
David de Lancellotti, vice-president of enterprise campus edge sales at Nokia, added: “[Research] forecasts the global private wireless network market will nearly double to US$8bn by 2027. This reflects the growing demand as industries face mounting pressure to modernise in line with global sustainability and efficiency goals.
“[This] research helps leaders build strong business cases for digitalisation by showing how private wireless and on-premise edge not only reduce costs but also accelerate scalable transformation with measurable improvements in worker safety, productivity, security and environmental impact.”
The study also showed that how leading chemical company BASF has deployed Nokia private wireless at its Antwerp facility to advance its digitisation strategy and enable reliable, high-performance connectivity across its six km2 premises. The private network supports AI- and sensor-driven use cases such as real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance, enhances automation and efficiency, improves worker safety, and reduces environmental impact.
“Private 5G has been a game changer for BASF Antwerp. We’re unlocking automation, strengthening occupational safety, accelerating innovation and meeting ROI targets in just two years,” said Steven Werbrouck, expert network connectivity at BASF. “We have become a front-runner for the wider group with learnings that will deliver value at multiple BASF group locations.”
Tech
Instagram is going PG-13. Will that make a difference for teens?

Depending on who you are, Instagram might now seem a bit more PG-13. That’s by design.
Meta has rolled out a suite of new content moderation tools on Instagram aimed at addressing concerns that young people are seeing “unsafe content” on the social media platform. Users under the age of 18 will now by default only see content that matches what one would see in a PG-13 movie, based on the Motion Picture Association’s definition.
The rollout of these new tools, which Meta calls the “most significant update to Teen Accounts” since they were introduced in 2024, comes amid renewed concerns that the company’s platforms remain unsafe for young users. This, after social media CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have been put in the congressional hot seat over the risks their platforms pose to teens.
The question remains: Will making Instagram PG-13 for teen users really protect them?
Ursula Smartt, an associate professor of law at Northeastern University’s London campus, isn’t so sure.
“The changes apply only to teen-specific accounts, which are accounts that teens have created using their truthful birth dates or accounts that Instagram has determined,” Smartt says. “Yet, it is common for teens to lie about their ages online to avoid certain restrictions.”
Age verification laws are already being introduced in a number of countries to avoid this problem. However, the number of people using virtual private networks, or VPNs, has surged in response, Smartt explains.
“Most teenagers know and use VPNs already, which mask their internet traffic and spoof their location,” allowing them to get around age verification laws in a given country, Smartt says.
Given how resourceful teens are in evading rules regardless of whether they’re in the virtual or real world, Instagram’s new rules could actually put more pressure—and responsibility—back on parents.
Anything that minimizes the amount of unsafe content teens don’t want to see on social media is a move in the right direction, according to Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern who studies the impact of social media on young people. However, these new tools are much more effective as a jumping-off point for educating children about how to engage with social media.
“The more children are having conversations with their parents about what they’re doing on social media and why and how and what this means, the better the outcomes,” Rodgers says.
That’s admittedly a big ask. Most parents barely have enough time to watch along during their children’s screen time, she says, let alone every time their teen hops on Instagram. But the sooner parents can start talking about how to use social media with their children, the better. Those conversations help young people develop critical skills, like how to detect intent behind what people are saying and posting on social media. That’s integral for learning how to then interact with and respond to people online in a healthy way, Rodgers says.
There are options for making the platform even more restrictive, and Rodgers admits it can be tempting for parents to just turn on these settings and let Meta’s designers do their job. It’s much better for parents to approach these new tools collaboratively and make it a conversation.
“That’s when you’re explaining to teens why some content would be restricted,” Rodgers says. “Why would you want them to see it? Why might you not want them to see it?”
Those conversations might reveal something surprising: Parents and their children are more aligned than either might think when it comes to content on social media.
“[Teens are] generally not trying to go view things that we would consider really outside of their age,” Rodgers says. “They’re quite happy to not be pushed too much on that. They find it uncomfortable.”
This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.
Citation:
Instagram is going PG-13. Will that make a difference for teens? (2025, October 21)
retrieved 21 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-instagram-pg-difference-teens.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Tech
Apple’s iPad Pro Is Tremendously Powerful, but Still a Bit Niche
I opened DaVinci Resolve and started editing some 4K footage and everything felt buttery smooth, but more important is the fact that thanks to iPadOS 26, you’re able to complete rendering tasks in the background without needing to stay on the app. I hit the export and render button, swapped to another app, and … well, turns out DaVinci Resolve doesn’t support this new feature just yet, so I had to keep the app open for the render to complete. You shouldn’t have an issue on Final Cut Pro, though.
The most professional task I typically use with my iPad is editing RAW images in Adobe Lightroom, and, unsurprisingly, the M5 performed its duties with ease, even with my liberal use of Adobe’s AI-erase tool. However, I also didn’t really have much issue with this on the “weaker” iPad Air. What I find annoying is the fact that this powerful machine still only comes with one USB-C port. I can’t plug it into my camera and edit photos and charge the tablet at the same time; you need a USB hub.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The iPad Pro is for a very specific type of person, and you probably know who you are. If you’re mostly editing photos and typing up documents like me, the iPad Air is more than sufficient. But if you’re regularly in apps like Final Cut Pro or generating all sorts of weird AI images, you may like the extra power the M5 iPad Pro provides—though you can certainly get by with the older M4 model and maybe save some cash.
But unlike the iPad Air, which is just affordable enough to exist as a nice complement to a MacBook for days you don’t want the bulk of a laptop, the Pro feels more like a choice you have to make between clamshell and slate because of its high price. At present, I’d probably pick up the new M5 MacBook Pro instead, but with more desktop apps coming to iPad, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too long until the iPad Pro finally becomes the touchscreen Mac of your dreams.
Tech
Scottish university claims mobile net breakthrough for remote medicine | Computer Weekly

Researchers from the James Watt School of Engineering in Glasgow are claiming to have constructed a new development in affordable, open-source mobile networks that enables near-real-time control of robotic arms. The technology could help doctors work on patients in remote locations in the years to come.
The first demonstration of the medical innovation has seen the research team use the system to perform mock dental exams on a pair of dentures, highlighting its potential for use in medical procedures.
The system is based on off-the-shelf hardware that has been used to build a 4G LTE mobile network which connects a haptic controller to a robot arm, with the network allowing users to direct the arm’s movements with very low latency, enabling a high level of control.
The research team built their framework using the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) framework, which uses open-source software to control mobile network hardware. They repurposed a USB network dongle, more commonly used for consumer mobile internet, to create stable connections between the haptic input device, the robotic arm and a computer configured to act as an intelligent base station.
The system’s signal quality, data rates and latency were monitored and fine-tuned using specialised xApps software.
Its mobile dongle also helped the team create a network that drew considerably less power than comparable connections using the software-defined radio (SDR) more commonly used in similar tasks. The system used 4.5 watts, a 90% reduction on the 45 watts required by traditional SDRs to perform the same activities.
From a performance basis during lab tests, the researchers enabled communications between the base station, the controller and the robotic arm with a bandwidth of 10Mbps. They said that such a connection allowed them to control the arm to simulate a dental exam on dentures with less than a second of latency and minimal signal loss.
The James Watt School of Engineering is part of the University of Glasgow, which was the first institution in the UK to confer degrees in engineering, and established the first chair of engineering in the UK in 1840. Its research environment includes coverage of a broad range of engineering subjects, as well as the interfaces with biology, chemistry, computer science, medicine and physics.
The college claims its research and teaching is “at the forefront of discovery, creation and practice that is internationally leading in education, innovation and new capability”.
Commenting on the project and its aims in a paper outlining the research, Saber Hassouna of the James Watt School of Engineering said: “The O-RAN framework holds a great deal of potential for enabling intelligent, data-driven, programmable and virtualised networks, but a significant amount of work remains to be done to demonstrate that potential being achieved in the real world, beyond theoretical modelling.
“The testbed we’ve developed here using commercially available hardware shows that O-RAN can be used to enable excellent performance in robotic teleoperation, which is a complex task. For applications like dental procedures, the robotic arm must move very smoothly, which requires high data throughput and low latency, both of which we’ve been able to achieve for the first time with O-RAN.”
Qammer Abbasi, head of the University of Glasgow’s communications, sensing and imaging hub, added: “This is a very encouraging demonstration of the potential of O-RAN to enable fine-grained, close-to-real-time control of a robotic arm. [This] showcases the performance we’ve been able to deliver in a single room with a direct line of sight between the base station and the arm, and we’re currently working on developing the system further to ensure it can deliver the same level of performance at greater distances.
“Ultimately, this could be a step towards creating reliable, affordable methods of performing complex tasks remotely, opening up new applications in medicine, automation, industry and beyond.”
The research was supported by funding from the Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed Cloud Computing Applications and Research and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
-
Tech1 week ago
UK police to upgrade illicit asset recovery system | Computer Weekly
-
Tech5 days ago
Why the F5 Hack Created an ‘Imminent Threat’ for Thousands of Networks
-
Tech6 days ago
What Is Google One, and Should You Subscribe?
-
Tech1 week ago
Massive UK dieselgate lawsuit reaches court
-
Fashion1 week ago
US brand Ralph Lauren reports 2025 sustainability progress
-
Tech2 days ago
How to Protect Yourself Against Getting Locked Out of Your Cloud Accounts
-
Tech1 week ago
When does it pay for housing associations to replace water and sewage pipes?
-
Tech1 week ago
WIRED’S Favorite PC Monitor Is $75 Off