Nokia, Deutsche Telekom and the Hamburg Port Authority are getting together to check out 5G in an industrial environment.

The project will grab a 8000 hectare piece of Hamburg dockland to take a closer look at some potential 5G use-cases in that sort of ‘real world’ environment. One of the things they’re going to try to get their head around is network slicing in an industrial setting, where IoT-ish applications and remote control may take precedence over awesome download speeds. Nokia has announced this only days after clustering with Telefónica Germany

The Port of Hamburg, we’re told, is both a logistics hub and a tourist attraction, hence the need for the kind of network flexibility only 5G can provide. People are, of course, entitled to spend their holidays how they want, but we suspect s significantly larger proportion of the port’s 5G network will be given over to industrial uses than facilitating social media uploads.

“This testbed in Hamburg is an important development step along the road to 5G,” said Claudia Nemat, Board Member for Technology and Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. “We need practical experience which we can get in the Port of Hamburg. Our goal is to understand how we can best adapt our network to customer requirements. The production industry and the logistics sector in particular are going to reap the benefits of 5G as a powerful lever for many applications.”

“The 5G field trial in the Port of Hamburg is thrusting open the door to a new world of business applications, with the potential to drive change in many areas,” said Peter Merz, Head of End-to-End Mobile Network Solutions from Nokia Bell Labs. “This is about making industrial processes much faster and more flexible. For the first time, all of this is going to be tested under live conditions in Hamburg – the importance of this project cannot be rated highly enough.”

“5G offers a level of security, reliability and speed never seen before in mobile networks,” said Jens Meier, CEO of the Hamburg Port Authority. “HPA is opening up completely new use cases. We can start gathering experience of this cutting-edge technology right now and shape the standard. This is going to benefit the whole City of Hamburg, not just the port.”

Another highlight of the two-year research project is the tortured acronym they felt the need to extract from it. ‘5G MoNArch’ stands for ‘5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond’ apparently, which is fair enough since 5G MNADSUCAB doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. There’s another of these in Turin, which seems to get more than its fair share of 5G action these days.