The truth about private 5G, certainly so far as Industry 4.0 goes, lies somewhere between the desperate excitement of MWC and the distracted indifference of Hannover Messe – and probably closer to the big German industrial show. This will be discussed in another piece, next week; but Volkswagen, surely the ultimate bellwether for this stuff, told Hannover Messe earlier this week about its feelings and findings, and suggested 5G is just another waypoint on the Industry 4.0 road, and a long way off, still. But what else did we expect?
Flanked by Airbus, Bosch, Siemens, and certain others on a panel session on Tuesday (April 18), Klaus Dieter-Tuchs, Volkswagen’s head of networking planning, put the MWC hullabaloo about private 5G into some kind of perspective. “We see 5G as just another technology to access the central IT network. For us, [it] is a small part of a complete network,” he said, before listing all the problems with private 5G, as presented to the industrial market today. It was in line with the message from the rest of the show: that private 5G is not a 2023/24 story.
It will take until 2024/25 to gain real purchase with the industrial set, to deliver digital change for certain brownfield use cases. Volkswagen remains very much in test-mode with 5G: four marques and four networks; Audi in Ingolstadt, Porsche in Leipzig, Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, and Skoda somewhere in the Czech Republic. Each network is from a different vendor, noted Dieter-Tuchs. “We are trying different vendors – to gain experience for live production networks. But we have no live networks, as yet – and we can’t say [exactly] when we will have them.”
So there; private 5G in the home of Industrie 4.0 remains a research project, largely. Airbus is further along with live deployments, as discussed in these pages previously, but it also acknowledged in Hanover that it is still kicking the tires; the hard-value of signal coverage and predictability is plain, it said, but decisions about network management and rollout strategy are still to be made. Dieter-Tuchs suggested, a little vaguely, that Volkswagen will have live networks “in the next months,” but raised concerns about user equipment, device authorisation, and network integration.
Like Siemens – sitting alongside on the panel, holed-up in hall nine with the best stand at the show, and crowing about the timeliness of its own 5G soft-launch this summer – Volkswagen views 5G as nascent industrial technology with plenty to prove. (Siemens, the story goes, will resolve these issues with its own system.) But Dieter-Tuchs told Hannover Messe that a prerequisite for his team is to ensure 5G integrates with existing networks in its plants – into a single management platform from which to control all local connectivity, devices, applications, and data.
In sum, he set out four challenges for private 5G. The first challenge is with end devices. He remarked: “Anyone with experience of private 5G… [knows] that not every end device works out-of-box. You need to test in advance that it can access the 5G network, and do what it is supposed to do.” Volkswagen is pushing for a “certificate of 5G campus readiness”, on its own, and also through 5G-ACIA, the industrial-focused 5G lobby group. “We want a standard process so when you buy end devices [you know] they will do what they are supposed to.”
Per the Volkswagen summary, the second challenge with private 5G is to, somehow, shift industrial cellular away from a SIM-based procedure to authorise devices on networks to a certificate-based access model, in line with Wi-Fi and other LAN technologies. “The advantage of certificates is you have a completely electronic [and] automated distribution process for adding those certificates to end devices. [Most] 5G end devices have SIM cards, which [requires] a manual and complex [authorisation] process by comparison,” he explained.
Even embedded SIMs (eSIMs), useful for global distribution and authorisation, require the involvement of the original device maker, he noted. “[It] is still more complicated than the certification process… We would like to see 5G end devices use [certificate-based] authentication mechanisms,” he added. Related, the third challenge for the telco market, to persuade the likes of Volkswagen that 5G offers an easy path for digital change, is to extricate the central management system from “inside the 5G network” and place it instead in the internal network IT system.
Dieter-Tuchs explained: “Standard 5G deployments [currently have different] management systems for the radio network, the core network, and for SIM management. We demand to simplify that and integrate [them] into a single overall management system – so you can more easily manage the day-to-day tasks to operate such a network. The market is going in that direction but we are not there yet.”
Related, again, he suggested 5G has to work in concert with everything else in the factory, from servers, and devices, and networks up to applications and algorithms running in the cloud – most urgently so network operations teams can trace faults to their source across the entire system. He said: “We would like to integrate 5G as part of that. Which means events that appear in the 5G network should be forwarded via standard interfaces to a central cloud management system. Only with that can we ensure our teams see all the issues, whatever the access network.”
