Note: sign up here to join the forthcoming RCR Wireless webinar on how to scale private 5G in Industry 4.0 (‘balancing customisation and simplicity in private industrial 5G networks’) on October 10, featuring speakers from Ericsson, EXFO, Kyndryl, and Verizon Business.
There is a loose 80/20 rule for private 5G networks (like for everything) that says their design and deployment is mostly generic, telegraphed ahead of time in well-worked blueprints, but that they also require a degree of customisation every time. This is because every enterprise venue – industry-for-industry across vertical disciplines, but also site-for-site within enterprise footprints – is different. A red-brick Victorian factory is different to a brutalist concrete prefab – is different to a clear-span structure in galvanised steel. Their radio propagation and interference characteristics are different, even before they are populated with heavy machinery and mobile devices – and even if they are geared for the same task.
You get the idea. But the misconception, perhaps, is that the customisation work will ever be eliminated, or even reduced very much. After all, network vendors and system integrators have been talking about industrial ‘blueprints’ for private 4G (LTE) and 5G networks for years, and the question of how to scale their deployment is only getting louder. Because their sale and usage is not going fast enough, probably – or as fast as the hype machine suggested, anyway. But it seems entirely sensible, also, to suppose that this build-requirement to customise industrial 5G will never go away – and should never go away if cellular is to be put to work on bespoke processes to enhance unique propositions.
The challenge, really, is to make the 20-percent simpler to deliver – mostly through better IT/OT integration. Which is something the vendor community is working on. But beyond this, plus some clever radio planning, there is not much to do. Flexibility and customisation are like the table stakes for private 5G to get a proper spin on the mad roulette of new global Industry 4.0 deployments. This is what network test and measurement company EXFO thinks, basically. “Yeah, you’re right. In the end, it’s fully customised, pretty much, every time – every deployment,” says Danny Sleiman, business development manager at EXFO. Instead, the only way to make private 5G scale faster is to organise your pre-build tests and tactics, he says.
“All you can do is pre-plan – and make that process simple. Whatever the business, the location, the environment; whether you’re in a warehouse, a factory, a mine; whether you’re indoors or outdoors or underground – you have to follow these steps prior to the deployment.” The path is learned, more or less, from pre-build methods-of-process (MOPs) for deploying macro 5G networks for mobile operators.
“They are adapted for private enterprise networks,” he says. “By following them, every time, you ensure it’s going to be functional from the start, and not impacted by interference, fibre-breaks, radio-downs, things like that.”
He adds something as well about the cloud analytics behind the process, when it is instrumented and delivered by EXFO: “Cloud reporting empowers IT managers to closely monitor each step, ensuring rapid and efficient scaling – which helps to make informed decisions, optimise resource allocation, facilitate [easier] scaling.”
Anyway, here goes; here is EXFO’s five-step hygiene plan to scale private 5G networks before a single radio is activated – a MOP to mop up the mistakes that derail most 5G projects before they have started. “That’s the term,” says Sleiman. “Like with passive intermodulation (PIM) hygiene, to eliminate sources of radio distortion at a macro site without the use of test equipment. It’s the same principle – fibre hygiene and radio hygiene, to make sure you don’t run into issues as soon as you deploy. It always comes back to the same thing: as soon as a team is appointed, whether it’s internal or external, these are the steps they have to follow.”
All the quotes below are from Sleiman.
Pre-activation
1 | SPECTRUM CLEARING
“Spectrum clearing is the first step. You’ve decided what spectrum to use – whether it’s private spectrum, or CBRS in the US, or licensed spectrum via an operator – and so you walk around your site and make sure there’s no congestion in it; you test to see no one else is in your 3.8 GHz, 3.55 GHz, 700 MHz band – or whatever you are using. You want to know if anything is going to impact your network before you start to build it. And, you know, it’s important because even the operators a lot of the time don’t know what else is out there. I mean, CBRS is shared spectrum, right, so you have to watch the power levels with your neighbours – both your side of the fence, and also theirs.
“Because if you are a retailer, say, and you want to scale to 3,000 stores, then you don’t want your networks impacted, and equally you don’t want the regulator on your case about power leakage every time. If there is an issue with a neighbour, then you contact the regulator and, most of the time, the regulator will send an email to turn down the power level, and it is fixed very quickly. It’s still early with CBRS, for example, so it’s pretty straightforward, but more issues will arise as it gets filled up. The thing, though, is to have the proof in your hand – to show there’s radio interference in this corner of your plot. If you have the proof, then you don’t risk being charged for the call-out, and the whole thing is resolved quicker.”
2 | FIBRE TESTING
“Fibre testing is important – to make sure the connection is good. A faulty 5G installation can come down to something as simple as a dirty fibre. Which has been a problem for a long time. The industrial space is using more and more fibre, and there’s not much testing of it. It’s not like with coaxial cables, say, which are certified ahead of delivery. With fibre, just because of volume and cost, they’re just built and sold.
“We did a study a few years back which found that 80 percent of fibre optic cable coming out of production is already dirty. And dirty fibre into 5G radios, and going between the core and the baseband units, and on the backhaul to the data centre, will impact your network speeds – and really your whole network. So testing that your fibre is clean, that there’s no break, that it has been deployed correctly, and so on – before you deploy your private 5G network – is key to make sure that you’re not going to have failure points later.”
3 | TRANSCEIVER VALIDATION
“Transceiver validation is a quick test of the transceiver components in your cell-site router, your radio unit, or your baseband unit. It takes less than a minute, and it’s a sanity check really – the same as with the dirty fibre connectors – to make sure your transceivers won’t fail when the network goes live. And most of the time with transceivers, which aren’t actually manufactured by the network equipment vendors, the failures happen in pre-deployment. If your transceiver is good, the chance that it breaks is slim – within 10 years of its deployment, anyway. Most of the issues with transceivers are out-of-the-box. So if you put the radio in, and the transceiver is no good, you’re best to know right away. That’s the hygiene factor.”
4 | RADIO DISCOVERY
“With radio discovery, the idea is to make sure the comms work; to make sure the configuration is correct and the protocol is good. You have 10 or 12 radios, right, configured with a MAC address or an IP address; that configuration is done on the PC you’re connecting to the radio. So we have a discovery tool that detects the radio, detects the network and communication to it, and ensures all that configuration is correct. One of the things that happens when you deploy a radio is the fibres get crossed – so fibre number one is connected to the wrong port on the baseband unit, for example. And the way to see that is by using this discovery tool to check the MAC address.”
Post-activation
5 | TRANSMISSION VALIDATION
“Once the network is activated, and the transmission works, you need to produce a kind of heat map of the signal coverage. Most of the time with a private 5G network, you’re using one frequency, so it’s very easy. You walk around or drive around your site with a spectrum analyser, and you create this heat map of your transmission rates – so you can see your dead zones and red spots, where maybe one of your radios is not transmitting correctly. It could indicate radio interference because you didn’t do the radio clearing at the start. It could be a lot of things, and you have to basically map the network signal to your work stations, and decide whether you’re covered. Does it cover your robots, your AGVs, your production lines?”
Sign up here to join the forthcoming RCR Wireless webinar on how to scale private 5G in Industry 4.0 (‘balancing customisation and simplicity in private industrial 5G networks’) on October 10, featuring speakers from Ericsson, EXFO, Kyndryl, and Verizon Business.
