Ericsson and Telefonica team up to bring 5G Car Manufaturing for Mercedes-Benz

Ericsson recently teamed up with Telefonica Germany to enable 5G car production using a private 5G network for Mercedes-Benz.

The Ericsson and Telefonica Germany team are building the network within a 20,000 square meters spread complex. The new plant will house solutions from  Ericsson’s Private Networks offerings and will hand over to Mercedes-Benz upon completion for operation, notes the announcement.

The facility could be the world’s first 5G mobile network deployment for automobile production at “Factory 56” in Sindelfingen.

Executive Opinion

Member of the Divisional Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Production and Supply Chain, Jörg Burzer, says, "As the inventor of the car, we are taking digitalization in production to a whole new level. With the installation of a local 5G network, the networking of all production systems and machines in the Mercedes-Benz Cars factories will become even smarter and more efficient in the future. This opens up completely new production opportunities."

CEO, Telefónica Germany, Markus Haas, says, "We are starting the 5G era for Germany as an industrial location and are building the most modern mobile network for one of the most modern automobile factories in the world."

Arun Bansal, President and Head of Europe and Latin America, Ericsson, says, "5G is about to change manufacturing as we know it through secure and almost real-time connectivity that will result in transformative productivity, speed and efficiency improvements. The car industry will be among the first to benefit, as will be the case with Mercedes-Benz where we are working closely with the company and Telefónica to put our 5G private network technology leadership into practice in Sindelfingen.”

5G Network Support

The new-build Factory 56 has all the systems and machines which will be operated via secure 5th Generation network with gigabit data rates and almost real-time latency times while handling large amounts of data.

Telefonica in their press release noted that full capability of 5G can only be reached with local infrastructure. The local infrastructure makes short distances possible which is implemented in "Factory 56". The "Factory 56" will be equipped by the cooperation partners with several 5G small-cell indoor antennas and a central 5G hub. The assembly facilities and materials-handling technology are compatible with the Internet of Things

The latest and state-of-the-art 5G network will help Mercedes-Benz to optimize their production processes. Further, these processes can be adapted to match market requirements at short notice. It will speed up the flexibility, production precision and efficiency as industry digitalization and Internet of Things becomes a reality in car production. The high speed and high bandwidth of the 5G network will facilitate data linking or product tracking on the assembly line.

Mercedes-Benz has also stated in the announcement that learnings from Factory 56 will be considered in future 5G implementations in their other plants.