Fraport goes all in on private 5G network

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

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.

And 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.

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. Autonomous vehicles controlled by 5G would help to alleviate this. 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. 

Another application is video analytics to visually check the condition of the airport’s runways. A task that, despite edge computing, generates large amounts of data through video streams, which are then transferred to the cloud.

New use cases

Even if new use cases such as autonomous vehicles, patrolling robots, and drones are the focus of the 5G introduction at Fraport, the new technology also brings other advantages like being able to standardize its communications infrastructure. So far, Fraport has operated different radio technologies for voice communication, or to network its IoT devices. Plus, long-term evaluations have been used via public mobile networks, with corresponding SIM cards in other end devices. In the future, though, Oswald intends to continue using WLANs in the terminals themselves, but there are plans to migrate to the more up-to-date and powerful WiFi 6.