Radio standard
5G is supposed to help with the maintenance and repair of buildings
Vodafone boss Ametsreiter looks at the digital twin of Cologne Cathedral with virtual reality glasses. Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Whether factories or monuments: Virtual images of real objects should help with maintenance and repair. The digital twins mean that small-scale on-site checks can be omitted.
Cologne Cathedral in Düsseldorf: Around 50 kilometers down the Rhine, the building shows all its splendor with towers, statues and decorations. “Fantastic”, says Vodafone Germany boss Hannes Ametsreiter and enjoys the view of Cologne’s landmark.
The manager is particularly enthusiastic about the technology that enables a view of the cathedral. Because the church is of course still in the neighboring town on the Rhine. It is just a digital image that is transmitted over the 5G cellular network to a screen in the Vodafone headquarters. Ametsreiter uses virtual reality glasses to determine where the digital sightseeing flight around the cathedral is going.
Rapid technical progress
It is a remarkable demonstration of this digital twin that illustrates the rapid technical progress in 5G. Because the 3D model fed with drone images, which is supposed to facilitate repair work on the cathedral, has been on the market for a long time. What is new, however, is that the 50 gigabyte program can be used via mobile communications – and not just at a location with an on-site server. This means that 5G is gaining in importance for industry. Because factories and machines have long existed as digital twins to better plan maintenance work, to anticipate wear and tear and to make production more efficient. With 5G, however, their possible uses will now be significantly expanded and simplified.
However, the new radio standard is not generally sufficient for this, but an advanced version. In the spring, Vodafone started with “5G standalone”, in which only 5G technology and no 4G hybrid solutions are used. Now Vodafone is taking the next step with “Multi-Access Edge Computing”. The transmission path will be significantly shortened by new data centers – data is no longer retrieved from cloud servers in Ireland, the USA and other countries, but can be processed in your own region. Vodafone now has three “Multi Access Edge Computing” servers in Dortmund, Berlin and Munich, with more to follow.
The network is becoming much more efficient
“The Edge Cloud is now at the edge of our network, so the path is very short – this makes the network much more powerful than before,” explains telecommunications manager Ametsreiter. “For the first time in Germany, Vodafone is offering 5G in conjunction with Multi-Access Edge Computing – we are thus opening the door to industrial applications with very high computing power at any time and from any location.” He raves about the “beginning of a software-driven revolution in industrial production”. Vodafone works together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and uses their “Wavelength” technology, with which cloud data can now be called up in real time directly at the edge of the cellular network.
Vodafone’s competitors Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica (O2) are also developing their 5G network further so that the radio standard can also be used for digital twins. The start-up Haltian has developed a digital image of an office building in Telefónica’s Munich 5G technology laboratory. Sensors measure the room temperature, air quality and movement in the rooms in real time and display this in the digital twin. Edge computing, on the other hand, was important in a Telefónica gaming test in Munich in the summer – thanks to real-time mobile communications, the data-intensive application was easy to play with virtual reality headsets.
Digital twins
What exactly makes 5G so important for the flexible use of digital twins, explains developer Silas Fuchs, whose company Northdocks created the digital model of Cologne Cathedral. He points to the headset that is used in the VR application: “This small headset would be completely overwhelmed with the amount of data without 5G, both in terms of memory and, above all, in terms of computing power.” If you only resort to 4G or WiFi for the transmission, the transmission would be jerky or it would even break off. Even with 5G without edge computing, the transmission would be bad, he says.
In addition to the virtual reality application of Cologne Cathedral, Northdocks also sells digital twins from factories and waterworks as well as exercise programs for the fire brigade. So far, on-site servers have been required to use such programs, so they are location-bound. Thanks to 5G, they can also be used elsewhere – a huge advantage from Project Manager Fuchs’ point of view. “The flexibility that VR streaming with 5G and edge computing offers us is what makes a huge number of industrial applications possible in the first place,” he says.
And what does the industry say? The Central Association of the Electrical and Electronics Industry (ZVEI) also sees the topic of 5G and Edge Computing as positive. “Completely new application possibilities” would arise, for example in the location-independent operation and analysis of machines across national borders via tablets, says Gunther Koschnick from the ZVEI Automation Association. “5G is becoming an increasingly important part of modern industrial systems, which is only possible with the use of the digital twin.”