Orange Belgium is now welcoming its first wave of industrial partners to the Orange Industry 4.0 Campus for business. The Port of Antwerp, the chemical company, Borealis, and high-tech polymer manufacturer, Covestro, started to co-innovate to developing real-life applications, maximising the full potential of 5G at Orange Belgium’s testing hub. Deloitte Belgium will advise the community on shaping and realising the business potential of this 5G innovation hub. With Orange’s 5G testing network being deployed on the campus, industrial partners will benefit from dedicated connectivity and a guaranteed service quality appropriate for their specific use cases.
Orange Belgium launched this 5G testing network in Antwerp in late 2019 and it is the country’s first 5G stand-alone architecture network. It is now available for use by Orange’s industrial partners, who will benefit from 5G’s full potential: dedicated and tailor-made connectivity adapted to the specific requirements of new innovations such as wireless manufacturing and real-time automation. As Orange Belgium is not just adding 5G capacities on top of the existing 4G/3G technologies, it is deploying a separate network enabling network slicing, very low latency and massive IoT in the port of Antwerp region, enabling the various industry stakeholders to enjoy unmatched performance, reliability and security.
Orange Industry 4.0 Campus industrial partners to demonstrate the possibilities of 5G stand-alone technology
Using the full potential of 5G in Orange Belgium’s test network, different real-life and business-critical applications will be built and tested in an industrial environment, including connected tugboats and Smart Field Operators:
– The vessels towing process of connected tugboats will be enhanced thanks to real time broadcasting of mobile radar images to the control room, sent by high level definition embedded cameras. These cameras can be remote controlled in real time.
– For Smart Field Operators, mission critical communications need a guaranteed preemption priority to increase the worker’s security in case of alert. These field operators will receive real time and rich technical information about equipment to be operated or maintained, by visualising a digital twin of the infrastructure they’re working on. Remote assistance from the control centre will also be eased by real time transfer of images from the field to increase the worker’s safety.
Werner De Laet, Orange Belgium’s Chief Enterprise Officer, said: “Now that we provide 5G stand-alone (SA) connectivity in our 5G testing hub for business, we offer our partners dedicated and tailor-made connectivity adapted to the specific demands of innovative new applications such as wireless manufacturing, real-time automation, Smart Cities and the Internet of Things (IoT). So we are absolutely thrilled with the response we have received from the industrial partners within the Port of Antwerp. Now that this 5G industrial ecosystem is up and running, we will share its progress with the public by the end of June. As such, even if regulatory and legal changes remain necessary, Orange Belgium will continue to play its role of bold challenger on the business market.”
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