Journey 2024 by Atos Scientific Community

Azure for 5G as softwareįraport and NTT were also open about the chosen technology approach. “Because we wanted to keep the option open of being able to make adjustments during the project phase, we opted for an open standard and chose OpenRAN as the 5G approach,” says Kai Grunwitz, CEO of NTT Ltd. “One thing that spoke in favor of NTT was it had already been able to gain experience of best practices in other 5G projects, such as at Cologne Bonn Airport,” Oswald says. The project so far had a research and development phase at the start, which is why Fraport didn’t want to tackle the 5G migration alone, but instead brought in Japanese global telecommunications and technology services company NTT as a partner. Another use case could be small robots that transport delayed suitcases to the aircraft rather than be driven by people, as it’s done today. Autonomous vehicles controlled by 5G would help to alleviate this. Oswald adds the importance of illumination for operation because when material or equipment have to be transported to an aircraft over long distances, it’s time-consuming for employees since the speed limit on the apron is 30 km/h. The motivation to set up its own 5G infrastructure came less from the suffering of a legacy installation and more from the desire to enable new use cases during the digitization journey. At the same time, the network coverage will be extended to the entire airport area. This way, the nearly 30km of perimeter fencing could be monitored with cameras via radio. It would also be possible to spare robots or drones inspection rounds if they patrol independently with 5G support.Īnd according to Oswald, it’s difficult to adequately illuminate the airport’s large open spaces with the WLAN technology used up to now. “In everyday life, there are always problems with WLAN coverage during under-wing operations, for example, when aircraft wings block reception,” he says.

Or as Fraport SVP of IT infrastructure Fritz Oswald puts it: “We definitely see 5G as a key technology for digitalization.”

There were a multitude of reasons for Fraport AG, the operating company of Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt, to build one of the largest European private 5G campus networks: automation, autonomous driving, localization of devices, and processing data in real time.

Journey 2024 by Atos Scientific Community