Deutsche Telekom has announced a collaboration with Nokia and Hamburg Port Authority to conduct research into the use of 5G in an industrial environment.
The partners will use the 8,000-hectare site in the Port of Hambug to carry out 5G tests of functions such as network slicing.
As part of the tests, 5G will be used for testing out expected real-world use cases including things such as traffic lights management, virtual reality, and processing data from mobile sensors for IoT deployments.
Claudia Nemat, Board Member for Technology and Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, said:
“This testbed in Hamburg is an important development step along the road to 5G. We need practical experience which we can get in the Port of Hamburg. Our goal is to understand how we can best adapt our network to customer requirements.
The production industry and the logistics sector in particular are going to reap the benefits of 5G as a powerful lever for many applications.
5G will need to prove itself to be reliable and secure for demanding operations such as those found in a port environment. Hamburg Port Authority wants to assess 5G’s feasibility to collect and process environmental data in real-time, and even use VR to monitor infrastructure such as watergates to improve safety.
Jens Meier, CEO of the Hamburg Port Authority, said:
“5G offers a level of security, reliability and speed never seen before in mobile networks. HPA is opening up completely new use cases. We can start gathering experience of this cutting-edge technology right now and shape the standard.
This is going to benefit the whole City of Hamburg, not just the port."
The project is called '5G MoNArch' (5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond) and will be conducted over two years. The goal is to move current 5G concepts into real solutions.
Peter Merz, Head of End-to-End Mobile Network Solutions from Nokia Bell Labs, said:
“The 5G field trial in the Port of Hamburg is thrusting open the door to a new world of business applications, with the potential to drive change in many areas. This is about making industrial processes much faster and more flexible.
For the first time, all of this is going to be tested under live conditions in Hamburg – the importance of this project cannot be rated highly enough."
While the Hamburg testbed will focus on industrial applications, a second testbed — in Turin, Italy — will focus on multimedia applications.
Can you think of any industrial 5G applications which should be tested? Let us know in the comments.
