Phoenix Contact and partners develop industrial 5G router

Phoenix Contact, Quectel and Ericsson have worked together to develop and deploy an industrial 5G router for local industrial applications in a private 5G network.

With the help of the newly developed 5G router, industrial applications, such as machines, controls and other equipment, can now be connected to a private 5G network and thus be orchestrated in their resource usage, priority and behaviour. They therefore offer an advantage compared to previous mobile radio solutions, which can only use (mostly licence-free) radio bands with a best-effort principle and which have to accept performance losses when the radio spectrum is heavily occupied.

To achieve this, all three companies combined their relevant experince: Phoenix Contact as a supplier of WLAN, Bluetooth and mobile radio routers for industrial applications; Quectel as a manufacturer of cellular and GNSS modules; and Ericsson supporting the product development as a network supplier and leading company in 5G technology development.

By starting to work together at an early stage, the three companies have been able to develop a solution that provides industrial-grade performance over private 5G networks. The collaboration between Quectel, Phoenix Contact and Ericsson has seen extensive interoperability testing at the Ericsson lab to ensure the reliable commercial performance of the 5G router. The experience is highly important for Ericsson following the strategic approach of offering 5G solutions jointly with mobile network operators to the industry. In addition, all three companies cooperated closely to enable Industry 4.0 applications with this 5G standalone private network.