A new technology being trialled by Three Ireland with several corporate customers at present has the power to open up new possibilities in a range of areas including autonomous vehicles, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), real-time manufacturing process controls, and emergency service provision.
5G Standalone operates on a dedicated 5G core network, an evolution from current 5G which operates on a 4G network. “It offers enhanced speeds, reduced latency, higher density, and has no reliance on 4G technology,” says Karl Duffy, head of enterprise and public sector at Three Ireland.
“These technologies take a lot of time to be developed,” he continues. “You can’t really get into realising the full potential of 5G without full population coverage and then build 5G stand-alone on top of that. We now have 94 per cent population coverage. The thing that makes us different is that we don’t pad the statistics. We don’t blend 4G and 5G. When we talk about 94 per cent 5G coverage, we are talking about dedicated spectrum. We are the first in Ireland to bring 5G stand-alone to the market. We haven’t got under the skin of what it can do yet, but the possibilities are very exciting.”
The technology allows users to create their virtual dedicated networks using a technique known as “slicing”. This means that users such as emergency services won’t be competing with other users for bandwidth on a potentially congested network.
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Crowd management is one example. “If you have a lot of people all trying to access the mobile phone network at the same time after a sports or entertainment event and if you have 50 Gardai trying to use the congested network as well, they can encounter problems,” says Duffy. “The performance of an uncontested and uncontended slice of the network would be fantastic.”
A hypothetical use case he cites is driverless forklifts in a busy factory. “If you have 500 people in the factory all with mobile phones and other devices like tablets accessing the network at the same time that could present difficulties for the forklifts. By creating a virtual network, they will prevent those problems from occurring. In the future, we may well be travelling on motorways in driverless buses and taxis and the low latency of 5G stand-alone will be critical for that. This may sound futuristic at present, but the rate of adoption of 5G technology is picking up.”
These are just a few of the possibilities. “We are working with a group of corporate customers to understand what’s possible, and we have a partnership with the Technological University of the Shannon to showcase the possibilities.”
AI is another transformative technology that could potentially benefit mobile networks and how they service customers. “It has the potential to disrupt, innovate and create new industries,” Duffy notes. “AI and mobile networks are inherently linked as AI needs mobile for mass adoption. The computational power required to run AI is very significant and puts a lot of demands on networks. We have seen demand for data growing and growing but we’ve always been the data network. We are well positioned to support end users to take advantage of AI.”
For the network itself, a large language model could be used to analyse all outages that occur on a mobile network over a year, or a decade, detect patterns and use that for predictive maintenance to enable the network operator to take corrective actions in advance.
“This is hypothetical at present but would offer great benefits in uptime and performance. At a more human level, it can help us to better understand our customers and their likes, demands and needs.”
AI and other advances bring increased demands for power with potential emissions consequences. “Our parent, CK Hutchinson, has set science-based targets since 2022. The aim is to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 42 per cent by 2030. We are allocating capital to achieving those targets and we have a sustainability team in Three Ireland managing different initiatives.”
The Three sustainability strategy, sustainable connections, commits the business to maintaining the level of directly procured electricity at 100 per cent from renewable sources. “We have also introduced sleep cell technology which powers down transmitters when usage is low. We have installed solar panels on 100 of our radio access sites. In future, all of our sites could be powered by solar PV and battery storage. Three customers and non-customers can get money back for returning devices preventing them from going to landfill. And we started using ecosims manufactured from recycled polystyrene from old refrigerators last year. We are doing a lot of stuff in the sustainability space both internally and for the customers we serve.”