The deployment is at the Schneider Electric plant at Le Vaudreuil, France.
It seems a long time and different age since Orange outlined its Industry-first 5G strategy in April 2019, with Schneider Electric as one of its industrial partners, although clearly much activity has been going on behind the scenes. LACROIX is another of those industrial partners that shared the stage back then.
Now Orange Business Services is announcing that with Nokia it has deployed a private 4G/5G private network with network slicing at Schneider Electric French site.
Nokia’s slicing solution supports LTE, 5G Standalone (5G SA) and 5G Non Standalone (5G NSA) devices and includes domain-controller software in RAN, core and transport layers for “full slice connectivity”.
Industrial setting
The slice continuity between LTE and 5G New Radio i(NR) allows Orange and Schneider Electric to operate an indoor network in an industrial setting.
With this solution, Orange and Nokia are continuing to implement and test the management of the different priorities, performance, and security capabilities adapted to their innovative use cases, while optimising network resources.
Orange Business Services describes itself as a global network-native digital services company with the expertise of an operator and end-to-end integrator, that offers industrial customers a complete portfolio: mobile private networks (MPN) built on private infrastructures, virtual private mobile networks built on the public network and hybrid mobile networks with elements of public and private infrastructure.
The choice of architecture is made to best meet the security, performance and resiliency requirements of the business customers’ use cases both on and off the industrial campuses, as well as to optimise costs, according to the operator division.
Power to scale
Arnaud Vamparys, Senior Vice President Radio Networks at Orange Innovation and 5G Champion, said: “Thanks to Nokia’s advanced slicing technology, Orange is able to further explore with Schneider Electric the power of scalable private 4G/5G connectivity applied to industrial uses.”
Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: “With Nokia’s network slicing solution, Communication Service Providers and Enterprises can enjoy first to market advantage through the early launch of new slicing services, for all end-users equipped with 4G or 5G devices. As a long time innovation partner, Nokia is delighted to achieve this first with Orange in an industrial manufacturing environment.”