Industrial 5G is super expensive. Also almost impossible to find a vendor that offers all the nice protocol features (Low Latency, native Ethernet tunneling, etc.) in their infrastructure.

Most don't want you to setup your own APN ;-)

That's a standard IoT usecase almost all telcos offer.

We have industrial SIMs with our own APN and get a IPSec tunnel to the Telco where we have a dedicated network to see our devices.

We have about 20 client devices, I would very much prefer to throw a bunch of APs into the warehouse and it just works - DECT can do it, so wifi should, too. I'd settle for 10mbit/s!

Wi-Fi should be able to do it. Dense 5G uses similar bands after all and they'll go through a couple walls.

The issue is that Wifi offers no reliability guarantees and does not scale when number of nodes grows beyond a relatively low number. So when number of nodes is large and you want to perform critical tasks (e.g. control robots, machinery, etc remotely) Wifi does not work.

There's no good reason it can't handle even more nodes, especially since you can have over 50 separate channels. Central control of the frequencies helps somewhat with density but not that much. We can and should fix those flaws.

I don't think I trust 5G for sub-second critical tasks either...

I know what you are trying to say.

But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.

Or at least prevent WiFi sensing tracking