Like Japan, Germany has become a leading hub for industrial private 5G/LTE deployment, with many manufacturers there seeking to build their own networks in unlicensed spectrum without any role for operators. Major telcos have been forced to respond and have done so in various ways, with Deutsche Telekom, unsurprisingly, foremost among them.
DT is seeking a leading role as a systems integrator bringing in all the components and tools required to deliver a complete industrial IoT service around a private network. Its principal partner in this venture is AWS for managed edge infrastructure and services.
The telco has also unveiled two all-in packages for factory and warehouse-based edge-cloud analytics following a deal with German IT services company GFT. This brings AI algorithms to provide industrial IoT and digital twin services to manufacturers.
Digital twins are software-based representations of physical systems, or mathematical models, used for example to simulate semiconductors so that logical designs can be optimized and debugged before making the hardware. Their role has expanded into wider engineering and manufacturing for simulating processes before deployment.
DT seems to be pitching at slightly smaller enterprises than the very big manufacturers, such as Bosch and Volkswagen, that have already determined to build their own private networks in the belief this will maximize performance and security. With this aim, the company has cut promotional prices on 12-month starter kits for NB-IoT, one of the low power WAN LTE protocols, capable of operating in licensed or unlicensed spectrum.
T-Systems, the company’s IT services division, was talking up its SI capabilities around private 5G at the Hannover Messe show this month. The company pledged to tailor solutions to different industries through a campus edge framework built around AWS Outposts, which extend AWS infrastructure services outwards towards the enterprise’s own network.
T-Systems has released its ‘AI’ offer for production and logistics at Hannover Messe. This is a modular package comprising hardware, software, connectivity, and security, according to its chief executive Adel Al-Saleh. “The customer receives an individual solution with all components such as trained AI services and cameras plus integration into their own IT,” said Al-Saleh. “Our AI Solution Factory uses standardized tools, infrastructures as well as methods and thus produces AI solutions on an industrial scale: fast, simple and efficient.”
The firm is developing a version for welding robots in automotive manufacture, using IoT sensors to capture data on the welding process, informed by analytics to understand and predict the quality of the joints being produced. This eliminates manual quality-control checks, and therefore cuts costs, according to the company. A version for logistics is also being developed.
Germany’s other two major telcos, Vodafone and Telefónica, have also been raising their game in private networking, aware that future revenue growth relies on taking a reasonable slice of that. Vodafone’s head of mobile private networks Marc Sauter has been keen to play the right mood music with talk of explosive growth in the field.
“A million private networks by the end of the decade? At Vodafone, we believe it is possible. In Europe alone, we have about a million companies that could benefit from private mobile networks – with most in manufacturing, along with logistics and warehousing, utilities, oil and gas, and increasingly in healthcare,” he said during a recent presentation on the subject.
He emphasized that enterprises needed private 5G to work for their own competitiveness, so the key for operators was to tap into and feed that realization. As he put it “Mobile private networks are closely linked to IoT; the same use cases apply.”
Telefónica has been mobilizing its forces for private networks alongside the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which represents many operators, especially in Europe. In March 2021, the operator started testing a private 5G network involving a TIP working group’s system at its TIP Community Lab in Madrid before field tests in Malaga. This will “address the exciting opportunities that 5G is creating in the enterprise segment, both through valuable features for our customers and more efficient network operations”, according to Juan Carlos Garcia, SVP of technology innovation and ecosystem at Telefónica and TIP board director.
This group wants to create a cloud-native architecture for private 5G networks, incorporating elements of a Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery deployment (CI/CD) platform already developed by TIP’s OpenRAN project group.
The main idea of CI/CD is to avoid the bottlenecks that hold up development and delivery of big software projects when one of several interdependent components is late. Components or stages are designed and automated such that one makes output continuously available for the next one in line, that being the CI element. The aim here is minimize the time between successive stages and releases.
The continuous development and deployment, or CD, part is supposed to ensure that all the elements needed to deliver a new release flow smoothly from source code into the ultimate executable system binaries as quickly as possible, again without hold ups on the way. All this really comes down to efficient project management, but the methodologies of CI/CD are supposed to lubricate, stimulate and help organize that process.