BROWSING: Buildings

The World Economic Forum has identified 18 more Industry 4.0 ‘lighthouse’ factories that have managed to “transcend debilitating macro forces” by making use of the latest industrial IoT-related tech. The organisation’s latest bi-annual lighthouse intake brings its total to 132 manufacturing sites, in various...

Danish shipping company A.P. Moller - Maersk (Maersk) has announced new smart logistics and warehouse facilities in China, Norway, and Pakistan. Each site puts focus on innovation and environmental sustainability. Maersk has also confirmed the acquisition of Danish project logistics specialist Martin Bencher Group...

As promised and previewed last week, here is a full transcript of the interview with Marc Overton, managing director of BT’s industrial go-to-market business Division X – from a conversation a couple of months back, at the UK operator’s annual Robotics Festival at its...

A new survey by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company says robotics and automation systems will account for 25 percent of capital spending by industrial companies over the next five years, mostly for routine manual tasks in the logistics and fulfillment, retail and...

Ohio-based indoor and vertical farming specialist 80 Acres Farms has appointed the US-branch of German industrial tech giant Siemens to supply hardware and software to automate and scale its expanding US operations. Siemens is also providing capital into the project, it said. A statement...

Verizon has deployed a private 5G network at the 5,500 square-metre ‘smart factory’ at Wichita State University in Kansas, in the US. The showcase facility, dubbed Smart Factory @ Wichita, is on the university’s science research campus. It is sponsored and “convened” by the...

Taiwanese IoT metering company Ubiik has won a $17 million tender from Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) for the deployment of an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system to host 450,000 additional smart meters. It is the company’s fourth consecutive AMI-tender win in Taiwan, it said,...

The installed base of smart electricity meters in North America is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8 percent during 2021-2027 to reach a total of 173.4 million units at the end of the period, according to a new...

Note, this is the foreword from a new report on IoT tracking in the supply chain industry; the report is linked here and (repeatedly) in the article below – and also in the images at the bottom. The title of this piece might have...

Risk of intellectual property (IP) theft, including of industrial trade secrets, is rising fast as manufacturing companies connect private equipment and processes. Analyst house ABI Research has put a figure on both the rate of IP risk and rate of IoT connectivity, forecasting that...

The Z-Wave Alliance, in charge of developing local-area IoT technology Z-Wave, has released the Z-Wave source code to alliance members on open-source software development platform GitHub. Alongside, the alliance has said Members can now “shape the future” of the protocol under its (OS Work...

Another private 5G story, and another which claims primacy and (apparently) unmatched scale. Vodafone Business, the enterprise division of UK operator Vodafone, has said it has built “Europe’s first hybrid private 5G network”, on a site covering 700 hectares. The hybrid definition, here, means...

The “largest private industrial 5G network in Europe” has opened in Calais, in France, using 59 small cell antennas to cover a 50,000 square-metre production site belonging to Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), the optical submarine division of telecoms vendor Nokia. The Finnish firm has...

The smart logistics operation at China-based retail giant JD.com “makes Amazon look primitive”, reckons regional English-language title The Asia Times. Certainly, its warehousing and fulfilment business, JD Logistics (JDL), caught the attention of the industrial tech media this summer when it revealed a fleet...

Want to know how to scale private 5G across manufacturing plants and manufacturing applications? Well, European aviation and aerospace manufacturer Airbus knows how. Of course, if you have followed the Airbus story in these pages, or caught its feature presentations and panel discussions at...

Last month, the CBRS community in the US made a swift counter-strike, in the form of a joint letter to the FCC and NTIA, against a report by telecoms lobby group CTIA that said private and shared cellular is bad for the US economy...

A panel session at Private Networks European Forum last month put the spotlight on the discipline of network and system management, specifically, where traditional mobile operators are increasingly facing-off with rival factions in the developing Industry 4.0 supplier market. These other groups include system...

Siemens has worked with Qualcomm to deploy an indoor private 5G network in CBRS spectrum at Siemens headquarters in Chicago, with a view to test and develop solutions to automate building functions and services. The private 5G trial network is being used, initially to...

Twenty-six organizations and alliances in the US with active interests in private and shared cellular for enterprise usage have jointly written to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to hail the “success” of the Citizens Broadband Radio...

Federated Wireless is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a private cellular deployment with California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) to support the university’s new ‘5G innovation network’, geared to “accelerate” adoption of edge and cloud IoT networking and AI analytics for public...

Note, this article is taken from the intro/outro sessions at 5G Manufacturing Forum, hosted by Enterprise IoT Insights and RCR Wireless. It is a summary, a ramble, and a call-to-arms – which attempts only to say that industrial 5G is a developing standard, which...

Network design and services firm Betacom has struck a channel sales deal (“integrated delivery model”) with Qualcomm whereby enterprise customers in the Industry 4.0 space will be able to link Betacom’s private 5G network design and management service with Qualcomm’s RAN automation and management...

Japanese IT firm Fujitsu is to start testing private 5G for equipment inspection at its major data centre in Yokohama, in the Kanagawa prefecture, as a springboard to drive “operational resilience and process automation” in the broader data centre market. The Fujitsu project, to...

Okay, so not a new use case, as such; it is just another connectivity-in-manufacturing case. But still, it is process manufacturing… at a giant paper mill! Swedish pulp and paperboard company Holmen Iggesund has commissioned local system integrator Combitech to deploy a private 5G...