Uniting to grow 5G in APAC country
Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), IBM, Samsung and M1 will be embarking on Singapore’s first 5G Industry 4.0 trial, in the second quarter of 2020.
The aim of the trial will be to demonstrate the impact of 5G for enterprises and drive the next bound of Singapore’s digital economy. The announcement is part of IBM’s edge computing solutions for the 5G era announced at IBM Think 2020.
The trial aims to develop insights and showcase benefits of 5G in Industry 4.01 It will be an innovation model that allows for development, testing and benchmarking of 5G-enabled solutions that can be applied across various industries.
This partnership consists of the following three main areas:
- 5G Innovation: The trial aims to design, develop, test and benchmark 5G-enabled industry 4.0 solutions that can be applied across various industries.
- 5G Solution Showcase: Solutions developed will be featured at IBM’s Industry 4.0 Studio2 5G Solutions Showcase. The showcase will feature Industry 4.0 solutions powered by 5G and leveraging capabilities such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence. The aim is to help proliferate 5G solutions to different industry sectors in Singapore.
- 5G Solutions Roll-out: IBM and Samsung will evaluate successful solutions developed during the project for possible use in their operations in a broad range of markets and sectors.
- 5G’s capabilities such as faster data transfer and more-rapid response times, when coupled with other transformative technologies like AI, can enable significant improvements to manufacturing processes.
The project will test 5G-enabled use cases for manufacturing, focusing on three main areas:
- Automated visual inspection using AI for image recognition and video analytics
- Improved equipment monitoring and predictive maintenance using AI-enabled acoustic insights
- Assembly and debugging using augmented reality to improve productivity and quality
Martin Chee managing director at IBM Singapore said it will implement and test Industry 4.0 use cases that will leverage IBM’s AI, IoT, edge, and augmented reality technologies, and network architecture built on its systems using open solutions infrastructure from Red Hat.
“We want to complement Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Economy efforts and empower enterprises and industry players with a robust and versatile 5G launch-pad through this trial,” he said. “This will allow businesses to leverage digital technologies to create next-generation solutions and be responsive to rapidly changing market and 5G adoption in Singapore.
With support from IMDA and our strategic partners Samsung and M1, this collaboration will seed Singapore’s 5G capabilities and strengthen its position as a leading industrial innovation hub and move us closer in fulfilling our Industry 4.0 vision.”
IMDA will share the learnings and solutions developed through this partnership with Singapore businesses and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the manufacturing sector, and 5G innovation ecosystem participants.
Samsung will provide the network and mobile solution, while M1 will be the telco provider. According to Tan Kiat How, chief executive of IMDA, the 5G network framework and skillsets could be established, allowing the solutions and the 5G framework know-how to be rolled out from Singapore and commercialised in other countries.
“5G will be the backbone of Singapore’s Digital Economy, strengthening our national competitiveness and reinforcing our position as a global business and connectivity hub,” he said. “We are committed to co-investing with the industry and welcome all companies to join us on our 5G journey.”
Edward Choi is corporate vice president of strategic alliances for Samsung Electronics Americas said, 5G-enabled technology can help manufacturers improve core performance goals like minimising equipment downtime, improving safety and security, reducing defects, and increasing manufacturing flexibility.
IBM and Samsung have been exploring several Industry 4.0 use cases:
- Manufacturers can take advantage of visual recognition and video analytics, as well as acoustic insights, to understand operating performance of equipment in real time and rapidly trouble-shoot issues, supporting improved up-time and reduced defects. Both technologies require the transfer and analysis of massive amounts of data and constant real-time AI learning — an area that 5G clearly excels.
- Augmented reality offers great potential for factory field engineers conducting preventative maintenance. Again, AR relies on large data models accessed via a mobile device, as well as streaming of high-resolution video. Without 5G, a field engineer could lose hours of productivity in downloading the right AR model or require multiple technicians to be brought onsite to address an issue which could have been resolved remotely.
“When we look more broadly at the challenge of bringing 5G-connected IoT devices to scale, it’s apparent that innovators and creators need a secure and scalable platform on which to build and deploy these kinds of industry use cases,” said Choi. “In our view, that platform must be one that is based on open standards to enable interoperability across devices and systems, so customers can build once, and run anywhere.”
