The government is promoting private 5G

On the one hand there are manufacturers who are looking with interest at the advantages of private 5G as shown by a recent Capgemini study and on the other there is the reality, the projects are still timid as we showed recently in our file “5G: why is it a real breakthrough for companies”. Large groups like the SNCF or Schneider, even structures like the Port of Le Havre are experimenting with private 5G, but things are not going fast enough for the government. “We believe that in many areas of the game, 5G can be a competitiveness accelerator for our companies,” explained Agnès Pannier-Runacher, minister in charge of industry. Along with Cédric O, Secretary of State in charge of the digital transition, she launched a 5G acceleration strategy with a budget of €735 million until 2025.

Priority areas: sovereign solutions, training, R&D

This amount is not totally new; it comes from the France Relance plan and the future investment program (PIA) and will be used to subsidize various projects. It will be supplemented by private funding to reach a total amount of 1.7 billion euros. 4 priorities have been selected by the executive. First, half of the aid will go to European telecom equipment manufacturers to develop a sovereign 5G network offer. We obviously think of Ericsson and Nokia, the latter recently announced changes to its AirScale 5G platform. Another part of the financing must be used for R&D, in particular for work related to 6G. Training issues are not forgotten with funding of €36 million. The Government plans to create 20,000 jobs by 2023 in this area.

But the most important part of this strategy is to multiply the use cases in different sectors of activity. To do this, the government will complete the call for projects launched in October 2019. In this context, Arcep had authorized several initiatives using the 26 GHz frequency band, also known as the “millimeter band”, offering better speed and indoor coverage. Among the projects selected was Bordeaux Métropole, which uses 5G to manage connected streetlights and ultimately ensure intelligent energy management within the municipalities concerned. Similarly, with a view to the 2024 Olympic Games, the national velodrome in Saint-Quentin en Yvelines will test 5G for the media.

Three additional experiments

3 other additional projects are emerging. The first is called Pirana and it is carried by Kalray, the designer of multi-core and massively parallel processors. He was selected to develop an accelerator card dedicated to the telecom market and more particularly for edge computing. Orange and Renault are stakeholders in this project with a pilot on autonomous driving.

The second project involves Adeunis, an IoT specialist, to work on connected buildings. Thanks to sensors and the 5G network, it will be possible to manage energy consumption (ventilation, heating, lighting), predictive maintenance or the protection of people (air quality, etc.) with less latency. For this, the project plans to develop a range of 6 products and 2 software platforms.

Still in the IoT, the latest project led by Médiane Système and called 5G-mMTC is available in 2 experiments. The first is carried out in collaboration with the French cycling federation to create a “sensor to cloud” platform with measurement modules on bicycles and athletes. The second initiative is carried out with EDF to standardize and federate the various sensors and technologies used by the energy company.