Cisco, Mitsui, and KDDI Collaborate on Private 5G for Japan's Smart Factories

Cisco Systems, Mitsui Information, and KDDI Engineering have teamed up to share the deployment of a private 5G network for smart factories. The three businesses are collaborating to set up a "Industry 4.0 Testbed" in the Shinwa Komaki SFiC Lab in Komaki City, located in the central Japanese prefecture of Aichi.

Using private 5G networking technology, the testbed will enable manufacturers to test and validate industrial use cases. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs), industrial robots, machine vision systems, and other components of intelligent factory automation are a few of the expected uses.

For industrial settings, private 5G networks have a number of benefits over conventional cable or Wi-Fi networking. 5G is ideally suited for smart manufacturing because of its extremely high bandwidth, extremely dependable low latency communications, improved security, and capacity to handle large numbers of linked devices.

Providing its own 5G core network, Cisco is supplying the testbed infrastructure. Mitsui Information is bringing to the partnership its knowledge of smart factory services and solutions. Installation help is being provided by KDDI Engineering, a division of the large Japanese telecom company KDDI.

The intention is to give firms the opportunity to investigate how new industrial automation capabilities made possible by private 5G might boost operational intelligence, worker safety, productivity, and quality control. Use cases can be tested and modeled before being widely implemented in factories.