- John Deere foresees 80% of its factory equipment being connected to cellular networks
- The manufacturer sees expertise in private 5G as a competitive advantage
- The company predicts a 20x increase in connected factory devices
John Deere thinks its bet on private wireless is paying off, and the agriculture equipment giant plans to double down on cellular connectivity in the years ahead.
“We have made the decision that the technology is so core to how we deliver quality products for our customers that as we do factory refreshes, that is just a part of the infrastructure that we build in as we reconfigure our manufacturing areas,” Jason Wallin, principal architect at John Deere, told Fierce.
John Deere purchased CBRS Priority Access Licenses (PAL) in 2020 in five U.S. counties, all located in Illinois and Iowa. In middle America, the company does not have to worry about interference from the U.S. Navy, which has first rights to use the mid-band CBRS spectrum. Wallin said that in every factory where Deere uses private wireless, the company augments its licenses by using additional CBRS spectrum under General Authorized Access (GAA).
Deere has now deployed private cellular in 12 of its 60 worldwide factories. Most of the networks started with LTE, and are migrating to 5G. Wallin said Deere’s private wireless networks are primarily in the U.S., but the company is also using the technology in Europe and Brazil.
While Wallin would not disclose the main vendor used for the private 5G deployments, the company has been working with Nokia for several years on CBRS. However, Wallin noted the ag giant uses several vendors and is currently managing its own integration.
“When we started in 2020 it was all about understanding what the art of the possible would be,” said Wallin. The company started pushing the suppliers of its manufacturing equipment to add cellular connectivity to their products, and now those efforts are paying off, with computer vision gear and some torque tools directly connecting to CBRS radios.
“Every bolt is torqued to the right spec, so we know from a digital twin that all the torques were set right, because of the connectivity,” said Wallin.
Wallin said Deere expects 80% of its factory equipment to connect to private cellular within the next five years, with another 10% on Wi-Fi networks and 10% hardwired. He said critical safety systems are going to remain hardwired for now, but may switch to wireless when 5G SA becomes more available.
“It is a superior form of connectivity,” Wallin said. “We believe that the advantage that private 5G gives us is so foundational that really it becomes a part of our secret sauce of how we do manufacturing, and really…an opportunity for us to extend our IP in that space.”
Deere did not want to name any of its private network vendors, but said it works with several partners for radios, core network technology and Spectrum Access Systems. The partner list does not seem to include a big system integrator, however. Wallin said Deere wants to do that work itself.
He said there are “three critical skill sets” employees need in order to work with Deere’s private networks. They need to understand industrial operational technology, enterprise networking and 3GPP networks. The company has had good success hiring people who have two of those three skills and training them in the third, Wallin said.
Cheaper than Wi-Fi, cleaner than copper
Excluding the cost of the spectrum licenses, CBRS can be cheaper than Wi-Fi as networks start to scale, Wallin said. That’s because one CBRS radio can connect many more devices than one Wi-Fi access point.
“Just from a pure RF standpoint you get an approximate 20 to 1 reduction,” he said.
Scale is definitely important to Deere, which plans to significantly increase the number of connected devices on its factory floors. Wallin foresees Deere’s device count going up by 20x in the years ahead. “A large U.S. plant will use 5,000 - 6,000 IP addresses and cover millions of square feet,” he said. “So multiply that by 20 and that is going to be a lot of connected devices.…The vast majority will be cellular.”
Private wireless networks are also replacing miles of Ethernet, which helps Deere with its sustainability goals. Wallin said every 1,000 feet of wire requires about 15 pounds of copper. “It’s really an exciting time for us because that’s a lot of copper that doesn’t have to get mined,” he said.
Wallin said multi-million dollar machines like laser cutters will remain connected by wires until they reach end of life, and will then be replaced by machines that can connect to cellular, either directly or through a bridge or gateway.
Wi-Fi will continue to be part of Deere’s factories as well, simply because there are so many Wi-Fi dependent devices. But for mobile factory equipment like robots and automated guided vehicles, Deere wants to put as much as possible onto private cellular networks.
“The biggest advantage that we see over Wi-Fi is for things that move around the shop,” he said. “It’s really important for us that we hand off quickly and cleanly between each one of those radios and we were not able to do that with the traditional Wi-Fi of the past.”
Deere executives were not completely sure where private cellular would take them when they first invested in CBRS, but now the company is convinced it made the right choice, especially with CBRS 2.0 on the horizon.
“When we started in 2020 this was a completely wild notion,” said Wallin. “Now, this is certainly mainstream for deployments going forward. I think what we see is we are probably two to three years ahead of where the market is at this point, and we’ll see more and more of those integrations going forward.”