5G and industry: is France falling behind?

The install­a­tion of 5G in France star­ted in 2020. This fifth gen­er­a­tion of mobile tech­no­logy fol­lows on from the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Each gen­er­a­tion fol­lows the pre­vi­ous one at the same rate of approx­im­ately once every ten years and each marks a tech­no­lo­gic­al evol­u­tion: after voice (2G), text and SMS (3G), and then mobile inter­net (4G), 5G now makes it pos­sible to offer high­er speeds, lower latency and to con­nect many more objects. Its scope is there­fore much wider than just con­sumer use.

[Videos pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Ecole Poly­tech­nique Exec­ut­ive Edu­ca­tion].

5G will have applic­a­tions “both in com­pan­ies and in large pub­lic spaces such as sta­tions, air­ports and sta­di­um. It will make it pos­sible to ensure the sim­ul­tan­eous con­nec­tion of thou­sands or even mil­lions of devices,” explains Pierre-Jean Beng­hozi, CNRS research dir­ect­or and pro­fess­or at École Poly­tech­nique (IP Par­is), a spe­cial­ist in digit­al eco­nomy. Some people even ima­gine that it will be pos­sible, for example, to zoom in on the screen of one’s mobile phone from the stands at the Stade de France to see a spe­cif­ic play­er approach­ing the goal… 

While 5G will help to relieve con­ges­tion on the pub­lic 4G net­work (which is close to sat­ur­a­tion in densely pop­u­lated areas), it was not designed for enter­tain­ment applic­a­tions, nor was it designed so that fans of Net­flix can down­load their epis­ode in a thou­sandth of a second instead of one. “5G primar­ily meets the digit­isa­tion needs of Fact­ory 4.0,” says Pierre-Jean Beng­hozi. “Most of 5G applic­a­tions are for industry.”

Presen­ted as the new indus­tri­al revolu­tion (after mech­an­isa­tion, mass pro­duc­tion in the 19^th Cen­tury and auto­ma­tion of pro­duc­tion in the 20^th Cen­tury), Fact­ory 4.0 is char­ac­ter­ised by integ­ra­tion of digit­al tech­no­lo­gies at all levels, right down to the man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess, allow­ing us to think dif­fer­ently about uses. “In this fact­ory, the Inter­net of Things is a net­work of net­works that allows […] digit­al entit­ies and phys­ic­al objects to be iden­ti­fied dir­ectly so that the data relat­ing to them can be recovered, stored, trans­ferred and then pro­cessed, without any dis­con­tinu­ity between the phys­ic­al and vir­tu­al worlds,” con­tin­ues Pro­fess­or Beng­hozi¹. And all this is pos­sible thanks to elec­tron­ic iden­ti­fic­a­tion sys­tems and wire­less mobile devices, to increas­ingly inter­con­nec­ted fixed and mobile ultra-high-speed con­nec­tion meth­ods, and finally to algorithmic and data pro­cessing capa­cit­ies that can be designed in a decent­ral­ised manner.

This con­tinu­ous and instant­an­eous com­mu­nic­a­tion between the vari­ous tools and work­sta­tions integ­rated into the man­u­fac­tur­ing and sup­ply chains implies invest­ments and a rethink­ing of organ­isa­tion­al modes, but it makes it pos­sible to optim­ise man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses as well as ser­vice man­age­ment. In addi­tion, it provides the means to improve flex­ib­il­ity in order to adapt to real-time demand and to bet­ter sat­is­fy indi­vidu­al cus­tom­er needs.

ArcelorMit­tal’s “5G Steel” pro­ject, launched with the sup­port of the stim­u­lus plan, is a good illus­tra­tion of the new pro­duc­tion meth­ods made pos­sible by 5G. The glob­al steel giant has installed its own private net­work on its huge site in Dunkirk, on bands made avail­able by ARCEP (Autor­ité de Régu­la­tion des Com­mu­nic­a­tions Élec­tro­niques et des Postes). Mark­ing its desire to remain European, ArcelorMit­tal has chosen to work on this net­work with the oper­at­or Orange and the equip­ment man­u­fac­turer Ericsson.

The Dunkirk site can be thought of as a small town with 3,300 employ­ees, which pro­duces 10% of the steel pro­duced by the steel group, i.e. 6–7 mil­lion tonnes per year. Here, auto­mat­ic bridges and gigant­ic cranes line the pro­duc­tion lines, which are about 2 km long and have more than 200 data sensors to mon­it­or production.

“This site is open in some places, closed in oth­ers, and has many areas not covered by mobile net­works,” explains Dav­id Glijer, tech­nic­al dir­ect­or at ArcelorMit­tal and respons­ible for the pro­ject’s deploy­ment. “It is abso­lutely impossible to cov­er the whole site with fibre. Until now, staff spent a lot of time going back and forth between the pro­duc­tion lines and the cent­ral office to reload data.” With 5G, the net­work is avail­able through­out the site. “In addi­tion, we plan to have our large trucks (with the capa­city to trans­port 120 tonnes of steel coils) move around the site (200 km of intern­al rail tracks and sev­er­al kilo­metres of private roads) autonom­ously, without a driver, because these ship­ments are com­plex and some­times dangerous.”

Eight out­door anten­nas have been installed on this site, which is clas­si­fied as a Seveso site and has strict safety stand­ards. “Safety is one of our obses­sions, and we have to oper­ate 24 hours a day: by con­trolling our own net­work, we are pro­tec­ted from a tech­nic­al prob­lem that might occur with an extern­al operator.”

Indus­tri­al risk is very high if we do not make the shift to 5G.

The 5G Steel pro­ject is already oper­a­tion­al, but still exper­i­ment­al. “Here we are really test­ing 5G in a ‘severe’ indus­tri­al envir­on­ment, because there is a lot of dust on this site, a lot of met­al, areas of high heat… We have to check that the met­al does not inter­fere with the anten­nas and elim­in­ate any uncer­tain­ties and risks regard­ing robust­ness and safety.”

In Dunkirk, 5G is part of a col­lab­or­at­ive, multi-site pro­ject and will be deployed in 2023 on the Flor­ange and Mardyck sites. But in France, ArcelorMit­tal’s net­work is sin­gu­larly isol­ated. In March 2022, Phil­ippe Her­ber­t’s report on the Indus­tri­al 5G Mis­sion² noted sev­er­al obstacles to the devel­op­ment of indus­tri­al uses of this type of net­work in France, in par­tic­u­lar the prob­lem of access to fre­quen­cies, the weak­ness of the eco­sys­tem around indus­tri­al 5G and the insuf­fi­cient avail­ab­il­ity of suit­able equip­ment and services. 

“Until now, in order to access 5G, a man­u­fac­turer has had to pay a min­im­um of €70,000 to obtain the right to trans­mit over an area of 100 km2,” Phil­ippe Her­bert points out in his report.  The entry tick­et is far too high to test a new tech­no­logy and the trans­mis­sion area far too large if it is a mat­ter of equip­ping an indus­tri­al site of a few square kilo­metres. Oth­er coun­tries have chosen to reserve fre­quen­cies for their com­pan­ies from the out­set. This is the case in Ger­many, where more than 70 uni­ver­sit­ies and com­pan­ies work­ing in the indus­tri­al, trans­port, health and media sec­tors have embarked on indus­tri­al 5G projects.

“We have to make French and European com­pan­ies, includ­ing SMEs, under­stand that the indus­tri­al risk is very high if we do not make the shift to 5G,” says Dav­id Glijer. “Our com­pet­it­ors are in Asia, China, and Korea, where 5G is already work­ing. But it is not enough to have the net­work, you need the applic­a­tions. It is there­fore essen­tial to attract French and European start-ups work­ing on such applic­a­tions in our wake. That’s why our net­work, although private, is access­ible to our part­ners in the Dunkirk Urb­an Com­munity, which will allow cer­tain com­pan­ies to bene­fit from it.”

Marina Julienne