Phoenix Contact, Quectel and Ericsson jointly develop the first industrial 5G router for private 5G networks.
With the help of the newly developed 5G Router, industrial applications, such as machines, controls and other equipment, can now be connected to a private 5G network and thus be orchestrated in their resource usage, priority and behavior. They therefore offer a decisive advantage compared to previous mobile radio solutions, which can only use all – mostly license-free – radio bands with a best effort principle and which have to accept performance losses in equal measure when the radio spectrum is heavily occupied.
This means that in the case of large data traffic, i.e. heavy use of the radio spectrum, performance losses must be accepted as there is no preferential treatment. This pleases the private user, but is a real no-go, especially in the industrial sector with real-time applications, because here absolute process reliability is the key.
To achieve this, all three companies brought their strengths together: Phoenix Contact as the first choice supplier of WLAN, Bluetooth and mobile radio routers for industrial applications, the Chinese company Quectel as the leading global supplier of cellular and GNSS modules and Ericsson supporting the product development as a network supplier and a leading force of the 5G technology development. By starting to interact at an early stage, the three companies have been able to rapidly develop a solution that provides industrial-grade performance over private 5G networks.
The collaboration between Quectel, Phoenix Contact and Ericsson has seen extensive interoperability testing at the Ericsson lab to ensure the reliable commercial performance of the 5G router. The experience made is highly important for Ericsson following the strategic approach offering 5G solutions jointly with mobile network operators towards the industry. In addition, all three companies cooperated closely to enable Industry 4.0 applications with this 5G standalone private network.
