FMBE and siticom deliver open 5G stand-alone campus network

FMBE GmbH is a specialist in the planning and implementation of sophisticated telecommunications networks. For a leading German research institute, FMBE and its partner siticom are realizing a self-sufficient 5G stand-alone campus solution for a 5G testbed in Bavaria. In this realistic mobile network environment, companies will in future be able to simulate and evaluate their industrial applications for the new 5G mobile radio standard. To this end, FMBE and siticom are pooling their competencies to provide an open 5G stand-alone campus solution with native cloud technologies. FMBE planned and implemented the HF network in the licensed 3.7 GHz range for private 5G indoor and outdoor applications, including the installation and integration of the radio units. In order to ensure the network quality required for future Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, the HF network design was software-supported, including level planning, calculation of the HF supply quality and simulation of the propagation simulation in 2D and 3D.

“Industry 4.0 applications, especially in the area of mobile machine-to-machine communication, result in significantly more demanding requirements for the RF network design than is the case with conventional voice and data communication via LTE cellular or WLAN networks . When mobile network participants, such as autonomous drones or mobile robots, move in a smart factory, one is confronted with signal effects such as reflections, diffraction, refraction or scattering on machines, shadowing and higher attenuation behavior in this frequency range. A high-availability HF network design is critical in order to ensure adequate supply quality at every location, i.e. in the case of a drone also outdoors at a height of several meters. This can only be ensured through software-supported planning and complex propagation simulations in 2D and 3D, ” explains Olaf Kämmer, RF planner and expert for 5G campus networks at FMBE. Together with siticom, which provides an edge computing platform with maximum flexibility with a cloud native 5G core system architecture and multi-access edge computing infrastructure, the partner companies created an open system and network architecture that meets the requirements for testing a wide variety of industrial Withstands Internet of Things (IIoT) applications in practice. "The experience of FMBE in the planning and construction of radio network components complements our expertise in the areas of software-based and virtualized infrastructure solutions, which form the basis of modern 5G architecture," explains Christian Freund, Director 5G Solution & Services at siticom.

"Thanks to the partnership with siticom, we are ideally positioned to equip a wide variety of customers, for example from research, industry, transport and administration, with the necessary flexible network and system infrastructure for their specific 5G use cases," confirms Rolf Ernst, Managing Director of FMBE .

About the FMBE FMBE GmbH (Fixed & Mobile Broadband Engineering) is a medium-sized telecommunications service provider with around 50 employees at two locations in Rastatt and Groß-Gerau. Together with our customers and partners, we plan and implement the networks of the future. Our service portfolio ranges from the supply of modern office complexes and campus networks with 5G, LTE, Tetra-BOS and WLAN to the planning and implementation of fiber optic broadband networks. In addition to classic mobile and landline network operators, our customers also include banks, industrial, trading and transport companies. Further information can be found at: www.netzederzukunft.de