US marine port and rail yard operator Carrix has deployed Nokia’s DAC private 4G/5G system at container terminals in Jacksonville in Florida, Long Beach and Oakland in California, and Seattle in Washington. More will follow, suggested a press note. Carrix and its subsidiary SSA Marine runs around 250 terminal facilities and rail yards in the US, Canada, and Mexico in North America, plus in other countries in Central and South America, and in Asia.
Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) system is its campus network product for large self-contained enterprise sites. It contrasts with its Modular Private Wireless (MPW) solution for large-sized regional macro deployments, as used in utility- and city-wide networks. DAC is offered in various sizes, according to the site. The press note said little more than the deployments are to “enhance the company’s operations at several leading marine terminals in the US”.
And also to say, the DAC solution establishes “reliable wireless connectivity” for Carrix’s “industrial marine terminal environments”, also enhancing its “security, scalability, and… future digital innovations”. Which is the standard marketing for private 4G and 5G projects. The releases suggests its Mission Critical Industrial Edge (MXIE) platform (or its “Nokia Edge Compute and AI platform”) is also in play at certain Carrix venues.
Hugh Gallagher, director of IT Services at Carrix, commented: “Nokia DAC has greatly improved our network security, performance, and reliability while also simplifying the maintenance and support needed to sustain technical operations effectively. Simply put, the reliability provided by Nokia DAC has enhanced our efficiency and advanced our technology initiatives.”
Harsha Bhat, head of global accounts in Nokia’s enterprise campus edge division, said: “The marine terminals industry faces complex challenges to improve connectivity and security in asset-intensive industries. Nokia Edge Compute and AI platform for industrial sites provides private wireless connectivity as a digital foundation to quickly introduce new use cases and applications, driving innovation and collaboration in the port while ensuring data sovereignty and security.”
Carrix employs 20,000 people worldwide. Nokia says it has 850 customers for its DAC and MPW solutions in “asset-intensive industries such as mining, manufacturing, and ports”. Last week, ahead of MWC, the Finnish vendor announced a new sensor fusion solution to mix multi-modal IoT data streams into an AI engine next to its private 4G/5G system to deliver singular contextual logic for bespoke industrial use cases.
The solution, called MX Context, joins its burgeoning mission-critical (MX) tech supplies for Industry 4.0. The firm is the first in the market to offer multi-modal sensor fusion, the firm reckons, enabling engineering teams to combine once-siloed IoT data to enhance and create industrial applications. The combination of sensor fusion and AI inference is “also something we haven’t seen anywhere,” the Finnish vendor said.
