In sum – what you need to know
Siemens-led 5G offer – Siemens will hold the customer relationship, selling slices of O2 Telefónica’s 5G network to utilities with its own increasingly AI-heavy Industry 4.0 solutions.
Wide-area ‘private’ 5G – optimised public 5G slicing is the only way to deliver the kinds of quality-of-service features associated with private 5G for distributed enterprises, says Siemens.
Two-way 5G expansion – O2 Telefónica will extend 5G SA coverage for Siemens’ customers; companies will co-develop new 5G and AI slicing apps for Industry 4.0, they say.
Siemens is to sell slices of O2 Telefónica’s public 5G network to water utilities and wastewater treatment companies in Germany as part of a new managed industrial automation solution. The firm said a dedicated tranche (‘slice’) of public 5G spectrum delivers the same sort of optimised capabilities for a distributed enterprise operation, effectively, as a tight Industry 4.0 integration for self-contained enterprises in private-5G campus setups. Siemens will market the solution to “thousands” of enterprises in the German water industry, the pair said.
Like with its position in the private 5G market, where it has a new radio and core network solution, and goes up against native telecoms vendors, logic says Siemens’ big draw for service providers like O2 Telefónica is that it has the enterprise relationships already. On a call last week, Siemens said water utilities and wastewater treatment companies in its home market are already using its Industry 4.0 automation hardware, and want better connectivity to underpin their developing AI agendas, to drive a smarter phase of ‘intelligent automation’.
The firm has a new range of industrial 5G (Scalance) routers, developed with its private 5G network proposition; these will be sold as part of the deal.
Siemens opened Hannover Messe last week with a series of AI initiatives of its own, including a new domain-specific Industry 4.0 foundation model, developed with Microsoft. The separate work with O2 Telefónica to optimise public 5G slices for the water industry bundles in Siemens’ ‘digital industries’ software, increasingly infused with AI and collected together in its Xcelerator marketplace platform. It is the “first fully integrated connectivity solution” to use 5G network slicing, said Siemens in a press note. It will work with the carrier to further “develop” slicing solutions.
The product is only available in Germany, for now, paired with O2 Telefónica’s airtime; a pilot customer in North Rhine-Westphalia is already testing the solution. Siemens said: “Unlike the manufacturing industry with its local private 5G campus networks, the water industry’s facilities are widely distributed and need to be connected over long distances.” National 5G networks, by contrast, go everywhere, pretty much; new standalone 5G (5G SA) technology, available with releases 15-and-up of the 3GPP standard, can now be sliced for superior wide-area connectivity.
In the water industry, with some localised densification, it means public 5G networks can be optimised to cover sundry pumping stations, reservoirs, water towers, and treatment plants. O2 Telefónica will extend its 5G SA network in Germany, which has initially focused on urban areas, to cover Siemens’ utility customers – as required, on a case-by-case basis. Siemens said: “[5G slicing] addresses one of the biggest challenges in the water industry: a secure and efficient central orchestration of distributed infrastructure.”
It went on: “Until now, many water utilities had to spend lots of effort for monitoring, control, and connectivity, which is often time-consuming, costly, and requires complex individual solutions… [Now] water utilities can easily and securely connect their entire infrastructure via 5G network slicing technology and integrate additional sites into their network faster… The new connectivity solution… allows water utilities to monitor and control their entire system of automation technology over a virtual 5G network using 5G network slicing technology.”
Optimised slices of public 5G networks deliver many of the same quality-of-service (QoS) features associated with private 5G networks, to a degree – which work as the table stakes in negotiation with enterprises about industrial automation contracts – and afford the only way, suggested Siemens, to effectively deliver them to widely-distributed enterprise operations. It explained the pitch: “Slicing… divides [a] physical 5G mobile network into customised virtual networks… These slices are regionally limited and optimised for… speed, response time, and security.”
It went on: “[Siemens and O2 Telefónica] worked together to develop and test a solution consisting of 5G routers from Siemens and 5G slices from O2 Telefónica to fulfill the high communication requirements of automation protocols. Thanks to the end-to-end separation of data traffic from the public internet, the solution ensures a high level of cybersecurity and data protection for water companies which are subject to critical infrastructure regulations.”
Axel Lorenz, chief executive for process automation at Siemens, said: “By working with O2 Telefónica Germany, we can offer our customers in the water industry a secure and reliable communication solution for their distributed applications. The combination of Siemens hardware and 5G network slicing delivers the necessary quality, reliability and security for demanding automation applications.”
Alfons Lösing, chief partner and wholesale officer of O2 Telefónica, said: “As a leading technology company, Siemens is the ideal partner for the practical application of 5G network slicing. For the first time, this technology is driving industrial applications via mobile communications with defined performance parameters. Our jointly developed solution marks the breakthrough for 5G network slicing in critical, distributed industrial applications in Germany.”
