UPDATE Last November, Inside Towers reported on John Deere’s acquisition of $546,000 worth of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) licenses at an FCC auction. The company said yesterday it plans to build a 5G network for rural production facilities in Iowa and Illinois.
According to NetworkWord, each of the five licenses purchased covers 10 MHz of spectrum in a single county and gives the holder priority over unlicensed traffic. Other users in the counties where Deere holds a Priority-Access License can use the same spectrum, but only if it doesn’t interfere with Deere’s local traffic for its private 5G network.
Deere didn’t want to wait for 5G to trickle into rural areas to take advantage of its benefits. “We figure we’re accelerating three, five, or seven years of progress by participating in the auction rather than waiting for it to get out to us,” said Craig Sutton, manager of technology innovation strategy.
Dan Liebfried, director of automation and autonomy for Deere, noted that using campus-wide private 5G networks would give the company more flexibility regarding network changes versus using wired networks. The wireless networks will also enable faster adaptability to factory production lines in response to product changes, cutting down on manual work currently necessary with hardwired networks.
“Our ability to flexibly reconfigure and change elements of our operation at a minute’s notice rather than having to run different ethernet or WiFi drops—that’s sort of a tangible no-regrets move,” he said. “This a great opportunity to innovate inside our own manufacturing facilities.”
Although the use of the CBRS bandwidth is still a few months away, according to Liebfried, the company has big plans for its use, especially regarding employee safety. Deere expects to wirelessly connect a smart vision system, using cameras to track where workers are in relation to unsafe areas.
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