Siemens marks a milestone by becoming a provider of industrial telecommunications services

The German manufacturer of industrial equipment Sskill got one license to develop a technology telecommunications network 5G with which it will provide services to corporate clients in industries as diverse as mining, manufacturing, construction or the energy sector.

The Siemens network will be supported in the radio spectrum that goes from 3.7 GHz a los 3.8 GHz and it will be ready before the end of the first semester of 2023, offering products and Industry 4.0 services and the Internet of things (IoT) to the productive sector.

“5G has enormous potential to transform industries and critical infrastructure to improve people’s lives and reshape industrial operations. One of the main differences between 5G and previous generations of cellular networks is its focus on machine-to-machine communication and the Industrial Internet of Things,” the company said.

Siemens wants to develop productive applications from its 5G network to primarily serve the mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, construction infrastructure and agribusiness sectors, thus projecting that in the medium term new jobs can be created in digital economyl.

The company assured that its 5G network will be a private network, first isolated from the public mobile phone networks known to the end user. This “isolation” from the mass market will make Siemens’ 5G network an infrastructure with fewer vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, according to the company.

The network will be enabled to provide 5G coverage in Jundiaían industrial region northwest of the city of Sao PauloBrazil, but the mere fact that Siemens has won a concession to exploit the radio spectrum becomes a milestone that could be replicated in other regions of Latin America by other companies that do not operate telecommunications services so that they can develop new value-added processes for the productive sector.

This, due to the intensive investments required by the construction of networks with 5G technology, a factor that impacts the financial statements of traditional operators because they have just finished recovering their investments in 4G-LTE and because they also face difficulties to monetize their first 5G deployments, to continue with the reinvestments from that technology.

Siemens had even been developing a 5G industrial telecommunications proposal focused on the Brazilian market for at least two years, while managing before the regulator Anatel the possibility of exploiting frequencies in the 3.7/3.8 GHz.

Already in 2019, Siemens and Qualcomm they were collaborating on private network projects with 5G technology for industrial processes, also from the 3.7 GHz band. During the collaboration, Siemens developed industrial machinery more suitable for that technology, while Qualcomm designed 5G equipment to be combined with that equipment. The first trials of these two companies were then carried out in nurembergGermany in that year.

Siemens was also lucky that the National Telecommunications Agency of Brazil issued resolution 742/21, from which the official use was established for each section of the 3 Gigahertz band: for 5G mass communications, for satellite television and for industrial processes, for which Siemens now announces official that it will have a 5G network for industrial processes, starting with that industrial region of Sao Paulo, a state that alone contributes a GDP of 470,000 million dollars to the general economy of Brazil.

Analysts have disclosed that private networks for industrial processes will require investments of 7.7 billion dollars globally by the year 2027 and that three economic sectors: energy, manufacturing and mining, will concentrate 67% of the total investment in this type of infrastructure. .

Different Mexican businessmen from the telecommunications sector have indicated in different conversions with the media that 5G technology deployments, only for the mass market, require between six and ten more sites than those required by 4-LTE technology to ensure coverage. service efficient.

What Siemens has achieved in Brazil therefore demonstrates the positions of other companies that supply components and finished equipment for telecommunications, such as Furukawa y Generacwhich have separately ensured that in order to increase 5G coverage and bring technological innovation to the productive sector from that technology, investment must also come from actors outside the telecommunications industry.

“There is definitely a change in investment coming. It’s not just because of the pandemic. It has more to do with Industry 4.0. Other companies will have to invest to enter the digital economy; to become more automated and take advantage of tools like the Internet of Things (IoT). The operators will continue to invest in the external plant, but companies from other sectors will have to invest in the internal plant,” Furukawa said in a previous interview with this outlet.

“5G is going to change the dynamics of everything we do and will force us to improve the telecommunications infrastructure. A change is coming in how business is done and this will force us to improve connectivity so that we can all be connected, for example, with the Internet of things (…) It is coverage and it is broader infrastructure. It is money efficiency. Our place in the ecosystem is at the center of it all, because 5G makes integration easier. Another reality is coming”, Generac agreed in another interview.

Until now in Mexico, only the companies Industrial Minera México and Peñoles have obtained, and that is publicly known, spectrum concessions to develop telecommunications networks for industrial processes, but internally and not for other types of industries.