RAI Amsterdam, the conference and exhibition centre in the Dutch capital, has a new private 5G network, courtesy of NTT and Cisco. The setup has been signed off in time for the Cisco Live conference at the venue this week (February 5-9). The deployment took six weeks, the trio said. They also called it a European ‘first’ for a big event space – which is debatable, given Hannover Messe in Germany has had a private 5G network for 12 months, at least, and spectrum has been freed-up in Germany and the UK, among others, for considerably longer than in the Netherlands.
The new network has been deployed in pilot mode. The Dutch Authority for Digital Infrastructure (RDI) announced in November that local spectrum licences in the ‘3.6 GHz band’ are available for local private 5G networks. It confirmed that enterprises and institutions can now apply for two 50 megahertz portions of the band, in the 3400-3450 MHz and 3750-3800 MHz frequency ranges. Licences are valid for up to 17 years; as with such regulation, they do not require a traditional mobile operator to be involved at all; applications have been open for some weeks.
RAI Amsterdam, which hosts around 1.5 million at around 500 (!) events each year, is a Cisco ‘shop’ already.
Cisco wrote in a blog post post-Covid that the venue had gone “all-in with Cisco” to upgrade its Wi-Fi gear. Last year, as Cisco Live moved to take up annual residence at RAI Amsterdam for the first time (“between a horse show and a pregnancy-related show”), it announced it had upgraded the network operations centre (NOC). This time, NTT, its appointed channel partner for private 5G, has expedited a cellular 5G deployment at the EMEA leg of the show.
The press statement about the new 5G network (translated from the Dutch) quotes all parties, and suggests the network will be used, in the first instance, “to make the building smarter”. There are mentions as well of traffic management, live streaming, and unnamed IoT applications. It includes references, also, to the importance of 5G for driverless cars, and the BBC’s usage of private 5G to broadcast royal affairs. “The RAI is taking the next step as an innovation centre,” it said, calling the deployment a “result of the [centre’s] digital transformation”.
Cisco and NTT announced a deal last March to collaborate on private 5G in the automotive, logistics, healthcare, retail, and public sectors. They said they will “co-innovate”, and combine to bring to market both “technology and managed services”. The takeaway was the pair would go ‘big-game hunting’ with the technology, pursuing major-scale opportunities. NTT is also reselling Celona’s private 5G system, plus Nokia’s in certain geographies. Cisco is selling its 5G service via managed service provider Logicalis in the US, among others.
Bret Baas, IT and digital manager at RAI Amsterdam, said: “We are developing from a traditional exhibition and conference location into an innovation platform and knowledge centre. New technologies are of great importance to both our customers and ourselves. They ensure that more is possible technologically during events… At the same time, it helps to make our building smarter, which is important for crowd control and sustainability… One of the major advantages of private 5G is that, unlike with Wi-Fi, network overload hardly occurs [and] you don’t need cables.”
Edwin Prinsen, general manager of Cisco in the Netherlands, said: “This pilot is beneficial for both RAI Amsterdam and us. A successful launch will allow us to use interactive real-time video for live streaming on location during Cisco Live in Amsterdam, without long cables, which makes everything much simpler. Moreover, it opens the door to other innovative applications like better managing large visitor flows, for example. With this private 5G, RAI Amsterdam is ready for the future.”
Baas suggested other events at the venue – Intertraffic Amsterdam, IBC, Interclean – will make different usage of the infrastructure (“communication between equipment”; “cleaning robots driving around”). Meanwhile, Jeroen van Hamersveld, general manager of NTT Data in the Netherlands, said: “5G accelerates the digital transformation in various sectors, including the conference and event industry. Thanks to the private 5G network, both RAI and its customers can develop new concepts and innovations, such as for IoT.”
