Verónica Castro-AllendeAccording to the former, the “private 5G” partnership between system integrator Kyndryl and network vendor Nokia has thus far led to 18 “large installations” on three continents. Some of them have covered up to 50 square kilometers of business environments. The two have extensive public ties to Dow Chemical Company, covering 40 different production facilities ( and a ramp-up to 200 worldwide ), each of which has” thousands of mechanical components. ” The large 50-kilometer deployment it alludes to in a recent blog post is probably this one in Texas. However, the company has also revealed Chevron Phillips Chemical ( CPChem ), a second significant name on its books.
As a producer of chemicals and polymers, Dow Chemical shares some of the same ground as CPChem. The fresh work with CPChem is based ( at least in part ) in Texas, at its headquarters north of Houston, just like the Dow Chemical project. However, the scope includes a total of eight facilities. Similar to Dow Chemical, the initial phase of the solution is based on LTE that is “industrial-grade.” It makes use of CBRS spectrum. Paul Savill, the head of Kyndryl’s worldwide network and edge computing practice, writes,” The company had outside Wi-Fi but wanted to transform its operations with high-performance connectivity indoors and outdoors, as well as advance connected worker initiatives.”
According to the post, the secret LTE network enables “quick access to mission-critical business applications across 3, 000 portable devices.” Additionally, it mentions “real-time collaboration between teams anywhere in the plant” (via Microsoft Teams ), allowing workers to access online field manuals to fix issues or to complete and resolve work orders online using SAP. In order to support IoT-based machine monitoring and management, Kyndryl and Nokia have also integrated specific operational technology ( OT ) assets onto the network. Kyndryl Bridge, an OT-linked and AI-focused Industry 4.0 analytics application, is being used by the company to foresee outages and probable downtime.
Eight LTE networks based on Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud ( DAC ) solution were deployed by Kyndryl and Nokia in two batches,” to cover multiple sites concurrently,” after the setup was designed and tested using CPChem. According to the blog, the project will progress “down the road” to “private mobile deployments internationally” and “further use cases and applications like 24/7 monitoring.” According to Savill, “private LTE/5G networks will add next-level automation, enhanced worker safety, and efficiencies into business-critical operations by layering on different technologies like edge computing, IoT, or virtual applications.”
To be clear, there were significant challenges due to the size and complexity of the deployments, the facility plants ‘ safety requirements, and some resistance to technological advancements. We constantly monitor and manage services to automate the identification and resolution of issues that could disrupt the network, and Kyndryl has successfully deployed the Nokia DAC solution.
He also makes the argument that the first success of LTE and 5G in personal networks should be taken into account separately, a point that has been made frequently in the enterprise section of RCR Mobile as well as these. Are investments in the 5G market slowing, according to Savill? The advantages and capabilities made possible by the personal wireless network deployments have swiftly been realized, and while that may be the case in some of the public network use cases, we are seeing some amazing earlier results with large-scale implementations of these networks, particularly in large industrial environments.
