Deutsche Telekom is to build a private 5G campus network at the Future Factory Hub, a research campus being built at the Werner-von-Siemens Centre for Industry and Science in Siemensstadt, in the Spandau district of Berlin.
The project, funded by the city of Berlin, is to help research and development into industrial solutions based on 5G. The facility will be used by research institutions including the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) and the Fraunhofer Society, which covers 72 research institutes across Germany.
Small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups will also use the site to work on ‘practical’ industrial 5G solutions, said Deutsche Telekom. A statement said: “Applications for autonomous production logistics are being researched and tested. The goal is to quickly transfer solutions based on 5G and edge computing into the production technology practice of companies.”
T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom’s corporate customer division, is offering its EdgeAir cloud computing solution into the bargain as well, to enable data processing and analysis on site in the customer’s IT environment. “Latency times for transferring data to a central cloud are eliminated,” it said, “[allowing for] edge analytics, local artificial intelligence, [and] augmented reality and virtual reality to be realized.”
Lutz Schneider, in charge of solutions for autonomous logistics at T-Systems, commented: “We are pleased to be able to support research and development of innovative industrial solutions based on ultra-fast mobile communications and edge computing. We are interested in making these modern technologies practically usable for companies, for example to speed up internal logistical processes in production.”
