Catch up and quickly: France, lagging behind in the adoption of private 5G networks dedicated to industry, intends to “accelerate” to promote the advent of “smart factories” supposed to boost business productivity. An area of 50,000 m2 covered by nearly 60 5G access points spread over 11 buildings: with the Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) submarine cable production site in Calais, France can boast of being home to Friday the “largest 5G factory in Europe”, according to the telecom equipment manufacturer Nokia and Iliad, parent company of the operator Free, partners in the project.
Despite this investment of “several million euros”, partly funded by the government, the race is far from over. Because French companies are lagging “structurally”, although they have been catching up since 2018, according to a report on “industrial 5G” submitted to the government last March. “The deployments of 5G private networks in industry are fewer than in other countries and the French experimental dynamic needs to be greatly amplified”, underlined this document. Conversely, China, thanks in particular to the technological advance of its giant Huawei, and the United States wasted no time in promoting its massive adoption in order to maintain the competitiveness of their respective industrial fabrics.
“The deployment of 5G has been much more aggressive in the United States” than in Europe, explains to AFP Sowmyanarayan Sampath, boss of Verizon Business, the branch dedicated to companies of the American operator, adding to have “obtained a very good support from the US government”. Announced as the catalyst for the next “industrial revolution”, 5G promises to upset whole sections of the economy with new uses, such as predictive maintenance or augmented reality, supposed to allow the advent of “industry 4.0”. . How ? Thanks to its low latency – data transmission time – a speed multiplied by ten, but also tenfold security with private networks, allowing data to be kept within the company.
Among the twenty use cases identified by ASN, “remote assistance” thanks to connected glasses makes it possible, for example, to call on experts “in real time”, without them being on the Calais site, thus reducing response times in the event of problems. “The debate on 5G in France has been cannibalized by the general public. In the United States or in Asia, you have not had the vote for a moratorium in the cities”, reminds AFP Jacques Moulin, director general of the circle DigiWorld Institute reflection, with reference to the health, environmental and societal questions that accompanied the arrival of technology in France at the end of 2020.
“In Germany, the industrialists appealed to have the possibility of having the allocation of frequencies, where, in France, the auctions were first [à destination des] operators. This is why the industry is lagging behind in France in the adoption of 5G”, he adds. To remedy this, the government made a series of announcements in October, ensuring that it committed “to accelerate its actions in favor of the development of industrial 5G” throughout the territory. Bercy’s main announcement: the launch of a “public consultation” to make 5G frequencies more accessible to manufacturers, by “substantially lowering royalties” for small and medium-sized sites.
A dozen experiments in the use of 5G concerning “the industry of the future” have already been supported in France, like the “5G Steel” project by ArcelorMittal, in cooperation with Orange and Ericsson. “There was an awareness,” admits Jacques Moulin. “But in the digital world, it’s not whoever is bigger who wins. It’s whoever goes fastest.”