Del Conca USA used a Celona private wireless network to clean up its mess of Wi-Fi APs in its Loudon plant and reliably automate its workplace
The company has robots traversing its TN factory stacking pallets of tiles
The Celona deployment also enables a neutral host syste
In the shadows of the Smoky Mountains and on the banks of the river Tennessee, Italian porcelain tile maker Del Conca has reliably automated its major plant with a private network from specialist Celona.
The multi-national Del Conca's American arm has used a 4G Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS)-based private network from Celona to enable it to run automated guided vehicles (AGVs) inside its large plant, as well as manage workers using forklifts to stack pallets of tiles outside the plant.
Analyst firm SNS Telecom & IT estimated that CBRS that the technology will grow by 15% between 2024 and 2027 to surpass $1.3 billion in annual spending by the end of 2027. Much of this growth will be driven by private network growth. The firm said in its latest report that there are already "hundreds" of private networks in the United States using CBRS spectrum - like the one at Del Conca's facility in Tennessee.
But why private networks rather than other wireless tech? Celona’s co-founder and CTO, Mehmet Yavuz, told Fierce on a call that Del Conca's robotic vehicles needed a cellular connection to operate all the time without ever stopping. Each AGV gets work orders and then they move, he said. However, “they had been having a lot of issues with Wi-Fi in terms of 24/7 continuous connectivity for these AGVs,” Yavuz said.
“Our legacy Wi-Fi system was simply unstable and couldn’t deliver the reliability and uptime necessary to support the critical production processes that are fundamental to our business,” Luca Chichiarelli, Del Conca USA's head of IT operations, explained.
Previously, the company had rigged up a maximal arrangement of Wi-Fi hotspots and cabling to try and serve its AGVs with a constant connection. As we’ve discovered already, robots don’t operate well at all times on a factory floor with a herky jerky Wi-Fi connection.
“The pain they went through...they tried putting up wireless access points [APs], that wasn’t enough,” Yavuz said. So, Del Conca tried to use special “leaky RF cables” and connected them to the APs “and they try to leak signal all along so that it propagates,” he said.
He noted that these are all passive radio frequency (RF) cables so that it was very difficult for the company to tell if there were any issues with the cables once they were installed.
“After all these investments, they were frustrated," Yavuz said. "Private cellular was the perfect solution from them."
Del Conca used a 4G LTE deployment in the shared 3.5 GHz CBRS band to enable reliable automation. Asked about cost, Yavuz stated "this was not a multi-million dollar deployment.” In fact, he claimed that the eight indoor mini 4G basestations that Celona installed to cover the plant cost less than the whole mess of Wi-Fi APs that Del Conca had previously tried to use to blanket the plant.
Celona's CTO noted that Del Conca's Italian plants will probably use private 5G to achieve the same kind of automation. He said, however, that the Tennessee implementation is a multi-year deployment.
“The whole facility is 30 acres,” Yavuz said. “We also deployed this in a redundant fashion...if something happens, let’s say there is a lightning strike, you still have the other [cellular] AP covering that region,” he noted.
Celona’s neutral host
Del Conca also has 50 or 60 employees working in its “mostly automated” factory. Celona installed a neutral host system so that employees could bring their own devices and get connected at work. A neutral host architecture can use private wireless to extend public operator's cellular signals into plants - or other areas - where the operator's signal would not usually reach.
Del Conca uses T-Mobile for its corporate phones in the U.S., In the plant, the system can also support AT&T phones and devices. Verizon, however, is still not supporting Del Conca's neutral host at this time.
Celona is playing in an enterprise segment that Dell'Oro Group identified as a "very large and mostly untapped opportunity" for private wireless vendors. Dell'Oro VP Stefan Pongratz noted in a recent statement "the market will continue to grow faster than both public RAN and enterprise WLAN, but because of the lower starting point, it will take some time before enterprise RAN revenues are large enough to stabilize public MBB swings."
Traditional RAN vendors continue to dominate this space. So despite its big time aspirations, Celona is not as big a player in the U.S. private network market as vendors like Nokia and Ericsson. Grand View Research, however, still lists them as a key company in its 5G private network market analysis report.