Telekom Slovenije, the leading Slovenian provider of the most advanced ICT solutions, and Iskratel, the leading European solution provider for the digital transformation of industries, observed the first tests of the 5G network they have built together in Kranj to enable a smart factory. In this way, they enabled the development of new business models and the testing of a smart 5G infrastructure, which enables a number of virtual state of the art networks for individual business verticals, including smart factories.
Kristijan Melinc, Sales Director of BU Core at Iskratel said: “I am very proud we have deployed a 5G network in our own running business environment. We leveraged our expertise in 5G Core and together with our partners shaped a complete solution that will allow us to address demands for campus networks in various industries. This way we learned much more about the intricacies of 5G applications from such a real-world installation rather than from theory or lab-style test projects.”
Telekom Slovenije’s Member of the Management Board, responsible for technology, Matjaž Beričič, MSc, said that “5G is an evolutionary upgrade of 4G. It enables the development of new and innovative mobile ICT solutions also for the industry vertical. Reliable, fast, and responsive wireless data transfer between devices will enable industry to stay flexible and competitive. 4G / 5G technology enables advanced multimedia services, the development of Internet of Things (IoT) services and the digitization of business verticals – while providing reliability and cyber security from the very beginning. We plan the public mobile network in such a way that within one smart physical infrastructure we will enable virtualized state of the art networks for different verticals – in different ways – as fully virtualized or as a hybrid public-private, so called “campus” network. With Iskratel, we have established a reference case in which we will be able to test different capabilities, implementations and new ideas for new opportunities on specific use cases.”
Where both partners evaluate the technical performance, the Institute for Non-Ionizing Radiation, as an independent and accredited institution, also performed measurements of electromagnetic radiation of the 5G base station in Iskratel’s production facilities. Measurements were performed at maximum base station traffic, with four test terminals that simultaneously performed a data rate test at the time of the measurements. “The results of the measurements show that the radiation exposure at all measuring points is far below the warning values set by the Regulation on the protection of workers from the risks related to exposure to electromagnetic radiation and the values set by Council Recommendation 1999/519/ES on limiting exposure to electromagnetic radiation (about Hz to 300 GHz),” explained Tomaž Terček from the Institute for Non-Ionizing Radiation, who also performed the measurements.
Sašo Šimec, COO at Iskratel and EMS Business Unit director, added: “We continue to develop the smart factory as a key 5G use case. State-of-the-art connectivity is a cornerstone to establish it: it links the real-time analogue world of the bustling factory with digital processing power that firmly resides in the cloud these days, as its nervous centre. Artificial Intelligence warns our people of deviations from the optimal processes and workflows, well ahead of time. This way we intend 5G to increase the safety of our people and at the same time improve our bottom line. We are convinced the essential building blocks of this solution can be reused in other industry verticals and deliver similar value to different kinds of operations.”