When I was a kid, had the hobby of racing and my parent told me that first thing to do when you jump into the racing car is to remove the rear mirror, so you focus and pay attention to what you have ahead, and you don’t look back at the ones that are behind you just focus in going faster and catch up the ones in front. The motto in Cumucore is to look ahead at focus in what is coming with new 3GPP release (Rel 17, Rel 18) and from those features select only the ones that will bring major value add to the concrete segments where we want to excel such as industrial private networks. 

How the 5G core David can compete with major market leaders Goliaths? See the external view how Cumucore is positioned among the key 5G core vendors https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/5g-core-market-10451.

According to innovator dilemma’s paradigm Cumucore is coming to play and in order to make us room in this crowded area we need to have a sharp focus and capability to deliver in agile way our commitments in the constantly changing project environment. We are the owner of our software stack that we have developed ourselves. This gives us the needed agility to be a great partner in research projects. We are looking forward to contributing to EU funded projects such as NEMO. When you are small you need to focus on key features that matters for the new market segments such as industry 4.0, IIOT and machine communications. These segments need something else than EMBB, they need features like, resiliency, security, privacy and energy efficiency, time sensitive networking and 5GLAN. 

It is clear that Cumucore does not have legacy that current major vendor have in terms of backward compatibility, maintenance of old systems, etc which consume lot of resources but in return gives credibility compared to new kid on the block. Legacy also slows you down, you can’t afford to be agile.

The EU funded projects are the right tool to find what are the needs of verticals that join those projects to explore new technologies and visualize whether they fulfil their needs. Thus, Cumucore has been participating in some of these projects to learn and translate those learning into concrete products based on the feedback from the partners in those projects. The recap of some of those areas where Cumucore has been delivering first of its kind solutions can be found end of the page. We are exited to move forward towards next major achievements. It is so thrilling to start a new project. There are new partners, new use cases and of course new challenges.

Next generation private 5G connectivity and the International Space Station

Aboard the International Space Station a dizzying array of bleeding edge technologies come into play to support the most challenging operational environment imaginable. To bring its networked communications systems into the next millennium, the ISS looked to HPE and their 5G network partner Cumucore to meet their truly stratospheric demands head on.

Thiss is an important point as we explore this once-in-a-generation undertaking through the lens of a uniquely adapted solution. Through the process technology executives will gain key insights on delivering mission critical communications in the age of 5G.

We have to look at the work at IoT-NGIN project to understand the role of the 5G network for the ISS, it’s important to grasp some of the main components of space research mission communications. This may or may not relate to human-to-human communications and in fact, use cases for machine-to-machine communications vastly out-number the human variety. But even these, in the context of an ISS in continuous flux, do not follow the more common, set-it-and-forget-it, IoT or mMTC type patterns. Rather, they are regularly refactored, reconfigured, tested and deployed for mission-specific requirements.

Why factory needs a Private 5G?

One of the more short-sighted positionings of a general purpose technology was the use of the word best effort to describe mobile networks. The common selling points for 5G for industry is the usual for any new x-G that comes to market. The 5G salesman proclaim ultra fast, ultra low (bounded) latency, ultra secure, ultra reliable, five nine connectivity, low cost, etc., but that is not what matters for a factory owner.

First and foremost is security, the industrial companies are regulation-driven companies that are rightly security-obsessed, the decision to keep their networks on-premise is a no brainer. While a great deal of edge and cloud functionality can be layered in to effect hybrid-cloud type architectures, the desire for complete control and accountability means keeping your core on-prem. That is precisely what private 5G is about. While a Private 5G system’s physical footprint, which we’ll look at next, is relatively miniscule, it’s layered security profile can be as robust as the multi-factor authentication and zero-trust protocols you put into place. But in a best-of-both-worlds scenario, that doesn’t mean handing out dedicated batphones to your workforce to close the loop. The very fact that you are operating your own private mobile network means the risks of BYOD disappear as these devices have fully programmable soft SIMs ensure safe hops from the public network and back again. 

Next is reliability and what is proven to work are robust LAN networks and will be but flexibility of wireless brings some benefits so having a 5G network that seamless connect to fixed LAN using new features defined by the 5G standards such as 5GLAN and Time Sensitive Networks (TSN) brings Cumucore 5G Core to the culprit of technology.

In a perfect marriage of mobility, flexibility and performance the Private 5G rig saves the day. It’s small physical footprint – something closer to a large WiFi transmitter linked server rack than a full base station and enclosure – should in no way suggest anything but full lossless, synchronous 4-8k. With no competition for spectrum, using dedicated frequencies and the ability to dial up different camera and device profiles on a whim, it’s truly next generation live broadcasting. What’s more, while consuming 10s of watts in place of kilowatts, the whole rig can be packed up into a small cube truck, ensuring as low a carbon footprint as one can get. 

We can see that Private 5G is a game changer in delivering all of the security and reliability benefits of a on-prem LAN network while delivering mobility, BYOD convenience and the most special sauce of all, Network Slicing all from what’s known as a COW – Cell on Wheels. In all of the use cases we’ll discuss in these pages, from Industry 4.0 to public transport, dedicated, leasable vertical-specific MVNO use cases, while the hardware may change based on the needs, the fundamentals of 5G’s winning combination remain. So while it may still be a few generations away from something my neighbour will install at home, he’ll certainly be ready to say good-bye to his LAN based network once and for all.