Airspan announced its equipment is powering a live CBRS wireless network at the FII Smart Manufacturing Center in Wisconsin, with 5G upgrades planned for mid-2021. The plant will use the CBRS network to manage all its autonomous operations.
Foxconn's plans to build a manufacturing operation in Wisconsin for its FII arm (Foxconn Industrial Internet) go back to 2017. In September 2020, Mortenson crews completed building the data centre in preparation for commencing operations. The first fabrication facility on the campus is a 100,000-square-feet building with several automate guide vehicles, assembly areas and welding stations. These required an extremely reliable network with consistent coverage to properly operate and communicate.
The Airspan CBRS platform, deployed over LTE, created an extremely stable connection for factory monitoring and management, Airspan said. The Airspan-designed network incorporated AirVelocity 1500 indoor cells which were strategically located throughout the factory. FII DTUs were connected to each indoor cell, 1588 Grand Master Clock switches were also installed. Airspan software managed the network which all flowed through the FII EPC and the SAS, managed by Google.
Next stage
The project's next phase is an upgrade to 5G RF in mid-2021. This is set to incorporate Airspan’s new OpenRange platform including Sub-6 RU on the hardware side, and CU and DU on the software side together with Airspan’s Control platform managing the network. The Airspan 5G platform is fully compliant with 3GPP and O-RAN Alliance Technical Specifications. The upgrade will offer higher performance and coverage as well as accurate distributed timing and synchronisation which will improve factory ROI.
