Leading aerospace manufacturer Airbus plans to replace WiFi at all its manufacturing sites with 5G, expanding its extraordinary existing 5G infrastructure.
Airbus is continuing to expand its 5G network to new countries and applications, after successfully integrating it into its own operations.
Today tablets and smartphones are a common sight in Airbus’s workshops and production facilities, as it’s 5G network has enabled greater device connectivity.
With the sheer volume of information transferred to and from aircraft, the shift to 5G is having a transformative impact on the aerospace sector is a whole.
With Airbus’s dedication to pioneer safe and sustainable aircraft, the company knew its digitisation of activities required a highly efficient, strong and secure IT infrastructure.
This infrastructure is provided by the company’s 5G network, that guarantees its independence from public networks and provides greater protection from cyber threats.
5G can achieve a throughput of up to 1.4 gigabytes per second, four times more than the current Airbus Wi-Fi.
The network offers new services, higher speeds and greater capacity, exchanging and storing a much larger volume of data without network congestion.
On the basis of this success, Airbus is continuing to expand its 5G network to new countries and applications.
A new generation of 5G
In collaboration with several industrial partners Airbus is developing a new generation of 5G terrestrial, aerial, maritime and space telecommunications solutions.
BPI France is also supporting this endeavour, which will enable users to remain connected even when thousands of kilometers away from the 5G antenna of a mobile operator. No matter if they’re on land, at sea or in the air they’ll be able to connect, changing how cars, planes and ships are manufactured.
Airbus’s Air!5G will enable areas without mobile operator network coverage like white zones or oceans to experience the power of 5G communications,with plans to roll out the technology over the next three years.
A technology which is also incredibly useful within natural disasters like earthquakes or during political conflict where networks or saturated or unavailable. This technology will also strengthen existing network capacities during major sporting and international events where a surge in users is experienced.
Airbus’s 5G stations developed by Airbus will exploit the latest technological advances in 3GPP standards, including:
- network virtualisation (slicing)
- densification of 5G coverage without a physical link (IAB – Integrated Access and Backhauling)
- spatial filtering (Beamforming)
Airbus is also working to guarantee interoperability between 5G networks and low-orbit satellite constellations.
This interoperability will happen through 5G NTN (Non Terrestrial Networks) solutions, enabling direct communications between 5G terminals and satellites. This project helps ensure the cybersecurity of communications in space, which is vital for government agencies.
These advances will increase performance compared to current solutions in terms of both distances covered and flow, offering ease of deployment.
“Our goal is to replace Wi-Fi in all industrial areas in the next three-to-five years,” Hakim Achouri, 5G/IoT Solutions Expert for Digital Aviation at Airbus said in an interview with RCR Wireless News.
“It is fast and reliable, and offers very good propagation and mobility. It is mostly positive, although doubts remain about the URLLC and low-latency part.
“And complexity remains with spectrum allocation at a global level, as well as with finding the right experts and SI partners to help standardise and automate from an end-to-end perspective – the device, RAN, core, cyber[security], operations, and so on.”
5G: Fueling the future of manufacturing at Airbus
5G has transformed Airbus’s factories, enabling the use of compatible tablets and smartphones in any connected industrial facility.
Previously patchy connectivity has been made seamless, paving the way for greater productivity and efficiency.
All of Airbus’s outdoor, dense or complex areas at its A350 final assembly line in Toulouse, France are now connected to the 5G workers.
This enables operators to input machine data to a mobile device instantaneously, whereas previously they would need to return to their work station, sometimes hundreds of metres away, to manually log information.
On-site firefighters and security teams have superior communications as well thanks to the network.
Airbus is also utilising private 5G to support autonomous guided vehicles, such as the industrial robots which transport fuselage sections between stations at the Airbus Atlantic Montoir-de-Bretagne plant or those which drop off tools and assembly kits at the A321 final assembly line in Toulouse Lagardere.
Airbus, in addition to expanding its private 5G network across manufacturing operations and up into space, also intends to increase its use in internal operations as well.
The network is being rolled out across its commercial aircraft production locations.
Already in operation in Montoir-de-Bretagne and in the final assembly lines in Toulouse, it will be fully deployed in Hamburg, Stade and Bremen in Germany, Broughton in the UK and in Getafe, Spain in 2025.
5G deployment in Airbus’s facilities in Tianjin, China and Mobile, USA will soon follow, highlighting the manufacturers commitment to making its operations and the operations of others more seamless, secure and effective through technology.
