06 December 2024
ZTE is collaborating with True Corp’s enterprise arm TrueBusiness and Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF) to develop a private 5G network solution designed to enable smart manufacturing in Thailand.
The three companies have developed a 5G-in-a-box solution that has been deployed at CPF's Center of Engineering Excellence (CEE), the food company’s sandbox innovation centre where partners and enterprises can collaborate on innovations or use cases for industrial technologies such as robotics and energy management.
ZTE said that the 5G-in-a-box solution enables intelligent manufacturing by providing the security, latency, coverage, and reliability beyond what Wi-Fi can deliver, with downstream data rates of 882Mbps and an average latency of 10ms. The solution includes ZTE's iMacro equipment, which is suitable for a food factory environment because it can be installed outside glass walls, which helps avoid potential contamination issues related to water cleaning and food safety.
The solution also utilises ZTE’s UniEngine solution – designed for industrial 5G use cases – that integrates the functionalities of 5G core, 5G RAN, and simplified O&M, and provides deterministic guarantees for SLAs.
True Corp is providing dedicated spectrum for the CEE network, which also employs network slicing technology to ensure quality of service and enterprise security. ZTE says the CEE network has demonstrated its coverage and penetration capability in the factory area, and shown significant improvements in data reliability. CEE will also use the private 5G network to introduce more use cases aimed at improving production efficiency such as autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), robot, vision inspection and AI.
