Israeli edge-cloud and private cellular software company ASOCS is working with Lufthansa Industry Solutions (LHIND), the system integrator (SI) division of German aviation firm Lufthansa Group, and an early pioneer of private 5G in Europe, to test and develop its own industrial 5G positioning service. The trials will use ASOCS’s own virtual 5G radio (RAN) network, along with a 5G core network from Athonet, owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). They will take place at Lufthansa Industry’s facilities in Germany, as well as those of certain customers.
LHIND handled a number of early private 5G deployments in the German 3.7-3.8 GHz ‘vertical’ band for sister company Lufthansa Technik, the airline services division of the Lufthansa Group, dating back to 2020/21. The deployments, at a Hamburg workshop for aircraft engines, variously utilised network solutions from Athonet, Nokia, and Vodafone, and saw the firm develop applications most notably to enable remote inspection of engine parts for its civil aviation customers. LHIND has since been offering private 5G integration services to other industrial customers.
High-accuracy indoor positioning (HAIP) over private 5G has long-been considered a key application for Industry 4.0. ASOCS, developing its own Hermes-branded positioning service, said the project with LHIND is “groundbreaking”, and a “significant step”, to commercialise 5G-based positioning – and remarked that LHIND will “rigorously evaluate [its] practical application”.
Len Schuch, general manager of 5G positioning at ASOCS, said: “This collaboration with LHIND [is] groundbreaking… in both the advancement of commercial deployments of private 5G and in exploring and developing commercial use cases for ASOCS’ AI-driven 5G positioning services. Working with LHIND will enable us to move 5G positioning and location services from proof of concept to a commercial offering across a number of industry verticals.”
Claudius Noack, IT consultant at LHIND, closely involved in the Lufthansa Technik deployments, commented: “Many of our customers have a keen interest in localization solutions. In cooperation with ASOCS, we can now enable localization within a private 5G campus for the first time. We look forward to collaborating with the experts at ASOCS and the successful development of numerous use cases.”
