A factory floor is the worst place to run Wi-Fi. Metal everywhere, dozens of AGVs and machines moving, and Wi-Fi 6 that congests and drops past thirty connections and hands off badly. A private 5G network gives the floor deterministic coverage AGVs, robots and machine vision can be driven on.
The floor ran on Wi-Fi 6 and was hitting its limits: congestion and disconnections past thirty connections, access-point handoffs that drop live links, no way to guarantee upstream bandwidth, and not enough capacity for the 4K machine vision coming next.
A private 5G network answers that with 5G small cells placed for the floor, an on-premises core and application server on-site, and managed devices on every AGV, robot and camera — deterministic where Wi-Fi is best-effort.
The programme is a coverage-and-integration problem — survey the floor through the metal, place small cells, stand up the core, and tie into the AGV fleet manager, MES and vision systems — not a product install.
Stated before any of them had an answer.
Past thirty connections Wi-Fi 6 congested and disconnected, and access-point handoffs dropped live links — fatal for an AGV mid-move.
Mobile robots and AGVs roam the floor under real-time control, so handover had to be seamless and latency deterministic.
Machine vision and sensor data push upstream; the network had to guarantee that bandwidth, which Wi-Fi could not customise.
A new network only helps if it feeds the AGV fleet manager, MES, vision and dispatch systems the floor already runs.
The coverage and the on-premises core are marked because they are why a site runs its own 5G at all: coverage it engineers, and control and data it keeps.
The scope of the work, rather than a capability list.
Rarely the subsystem that sounds difficult.
A factory floor is metal that moves; holding coverage as AGVs, racks and arms block and reflect is the survey work that takes the time.
Real-time control of an AGV or a robotic arm leaves no room for jitter or a dropped link; the slice and radio design have to guarantee it.
Machine vision pushes bandwidth upstream, so the design has to customise and hold that upstream — exactly what Wi-Fi would not do.
The value appears when the network feeds the fleet manager, MES and vision systems the floor already runs, and those integrations take the schedule.
Wireless engineered to the line's geometry and metal, not an office-grade average.
Seamless mobility and guaranteed low latency for AGV and robot control, with no mid-move drops.
Guaranteed, customisable upstream for 4K vision and sensor data, held ahead of best-effort.
Tied into the fleet manager, MES and vision systems, with monitoring and updates the floor can run.
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Wi-Fi 6 congests and disconnects past dense connection counts, hands off badly between access points, and cannot guarantee or customise upstream bandwidth — all fatal for AGVs and machine vision. Private 5G gives deterministic coverage and latency, seamless mobility, and guaranteed service for the traffic that matters.
Yes — on a dedicated low-latency slice with small cells placed for the floor. Real-time AGV and robotic-arm control is one of the main reasons a factory runs its own 5G.
Yes, with an on-premises core and application server. Control and data stay local, which matters for latency, for continuity when the outside link fails, and for keeping production data on-site.
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