To accelerate on industrial 5G, the State is supporting a whole series of new projects

The government wants to give a boost to 5G
industry in France. New promising projects have been selected and decisions have been taken to accelerate the development of the technology.

The Minister Delegate for Industry, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, and the Secretary of State for the Digital Transition and Electronic Communications, Cédric O, entrusted Philippe Herbert with a report to take stock of 5G. industry with a triple objective: to boost uses in the industrial world, identify potential obstacles and propose concrete actions to support industry in the emergence and deployment of innovative fifth-generation services. The overall goal of this mission is to put France, which is lagging behind other countries, back on the right track for industrial 5G.

The State will extend the 5G frequencies made available to the industrial sector

Before discussing the winning projects supported by the 5G acceleration strategy, the mission made it possible to identify seven obstacles to the development of the technology within French industry:

• access to frequencies,
• the need to accelerate the development of the 5G ecosystem in France,
• insufficient availability of suitable equipment and services,
• the need to make industrial 5G more accessible,
• difficulty in finding the right skills,
• health, societal and environmental issues,
• the lack of visibility of the maturity of French and European industrial 5G ecosystems.

The ministers, sensitive to these recommendations, decided to facilitate access to 5G frequencies in the industry. The State is in fact going to modify the corresponding decree, which authorizes the use of frequencies in the 2.6 GHz band, to facilitate access to them, while reflections are going to be carried out to open access, in the short term, to the 3.8 – 4 GHz band, initially for experimentation.

And soon, the State should launch a call for expressions of interest called “Campus Fablab 5G industrial”, with several campuses which will bring together, within the same place, all the actors likely to offer a service offer and support for manufacturers towards the digitization of their production process thanks to 5G, i.e. telecom operators, suppliers, integrators, exports, manufacturers, etc. Industrial players who wish to come forward have until April 8 to do so, specifies the government.

New innovative projects selected to help France catch up

At the same time, seven new projects have been selected in order to constitute a sovereign offer and support cutting-edge research and development, with an investment of 47 million euros, including 19 million euros in public funding, offered within the framework of the France 2030 plan. These seven projects are in addition to the 31 already supported by the State.

One of them, carried by the company Spectronite, even evokes 6G technology. Among these projects, we especially remember the “32+ fiber pairs” project of Alcatel Submarine Networks, which intends to develop an optical submarine system that can support up to 32 pairs of fibers, evoking capacities of the order of Petabit /s. France has real know-how in this area. Firecell’s “GEO 5G” project, in partnership with the Stellantis group in particular, will aim to use private 5G networks to develop a location system with formidable precision, indoors, for connected tools.

The other projects concern land use planning and the deployment of small 5G sites (“Convergence 5” project, from WeAccess); the development of new-generation low-power electronic chips for defense and security applications (“I-COM 5G” project, from Seamless Waves); and the development of a breakthrough solution for antenna testing (“TopTen” project by Kaptes, in partnership with CEA-Leti and Telecom Paris).

The objective is now, for France, to make up for the delay which it has compared to some of its competitors in terms of industrial 5G, as confirmed by Cédric O: “ The report that was given to us and the associated recommendations are structuring for the competitiveness of French industry, and show us that we are able to overcome the slight delay recorded if all the players are mobilised. “. There is no more.

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