Excitement is growing around 5G and the far-reaching impact it will have on the business world and on the construction world in particular. Burcin Kaplanoglu, executive director and innovation officer at Oracle Construction & Engineering, takes a look
Broadly speaking, 5G is about blazingly fast speeds, higher levels of reliability and increased capacity. From a business perspective, 5G is about enabling significant process and data management improvements.
For activities such as data collection, capture and analysis/evaluation – all of which are increasingly important to project delivery – connectivity is key. And with 5G, these are carried out in real-time, so decisions can be made almost instantly – and issues rectified at speed. It has the potential to be a game-changer for the industry.
Three key ways 5G will transform construction worksites
The speed, latency and scalability of 5G will revolutionise how construction workers do their jobs in three critical ways:
- Enhanced mobile broadband: Providing high speed and capacity.
- Mission-critical operations: Providing low latency and high reliability.
- Massive machine-type communications: Providing high scalability and geographic coverage.
Enhanced mobile broadband: 5G is expected to provide 10 to 100 times faster speeds. It could also unlock 10 to 100 times more capacity than current long-term evolution (LTE) networks. This will give those working in construction almost instantaneous access to data-intensive edge and cloud applications, enabling multiple users to interact with each other in real-time, from anywhere in the world.
Mission-critical operations: 5G will unlock the ability to access reliable information immediately with very low latency: anywhere from one to 10 milliseconds, enabling teams to understand what’s taking place on worksites in real-time and perform remote or autonomous construction operations.
Given that construction sites are complex and constantly-evolving environments, this will be a huge step forward.
Massive machine-type communications: This technology will provide highly scalable and broad geographical coverage to help with initiatives such as smart cities, where the number of nodes will be considerably higher than on a normal project; asset monitoring both on and offsite; and health monitoring.
Picture this…
5G will play a key role in project delivery in terms of data collection, capture and analysis, which will be crucial in monitoring the health, location, status and specifications of assets of all kinds, including:
Site machinery to ensure operational ability, availability, remote or autonomous construction operations – benefitting project managers, principal construction contractors and tradespeople.
Site components to ensure coordination with the project, enabling real-time reaction to changes and updates from the living plan – benefitting owners, architects/engineers, project managers and principal construction contractors.
Order status of materials or various components manufactured offsite to ensure a project is running on time – benefitting project managers, principal construction contractors and tradespeople.
High bandwidth and low latency from 5G will improve data capture and data access across project delivery processes. Increased visibility into data informs decision-making in the design phase, helps minimise issues and changes during construction, and potentially decreases future renovations.
In terms of video capture, 5G will also help organisations inexpensively deploy technology to quickly capture, organise and analyse massive volumes of video information. This reduces the need for some teams to even need to be onsite. Further, this kind of real-time, rich, visual information can provide reassurance to the owner as well as an on-demand transparent view of the project at any particular moment in time.
Imagine a BIM model that is instantly available and is enabled with rich video content to provide an even greater level of visualisation on site or about the site.
Also, the high bandwidth capabilities that 5G promises will mean that data-heavy formats such as video can be uploaded and stored in the common data environment (CDE) instantaneously, providing the latest visual information to project teams when and where they need it in almost real-time.
We believe 5G can make the site plan as accurate as possible by updating it based on almost each and every action on site. That can be gold for minimising risk and dealing with minor issues before they become major problems.
In addition, 5G will mean sensors can more effectively be deployed to improve safety by tracking individuals’ safety compliance, as well as drive supply chain efficiency by enabling better tracking of materials.
A word to the wise…
Before getting carried away, there are a number of caveats regarding 5G in construction that site leaders would be sensible to consider. Chief among them is the impact on standardisation and security.
From a standardisation perspective, 5G will help to increase collection, capture and analysis of data. However, many organisations and projects today don’t have a strategy around the standardisation of project delivery. This can reduce the potential benefits of 5G but also impacts the safety, quality, completion time and budget of a project.
The extended value of project data lies in what can be learned, understood and identified both in terms of spotting trends on current projects and dealing with them before they become significant, as well as providing lessons for continuous improvement across a project portfolio.
From a security perspective, 5G enables the potential for more endpoints, which essentially results in more internet-connected devices on site. This increases the need for rigour around ensuring security standards are up to date and are being followed across all of these endpoints.
Also, with 5G promising to collect vast amounts of data from so many different sources on a site, information almost becomes a currency. Most projects use multiple teams from multiple businesses, so it’s important to be conscious of who has access to which information in order to protect both IP and sensitive data.
While we’re only really scratching at the surface of the opportunity of 5G today, our belief is that it is going to help us improve productivity, safety and compliance for construction and engineering. This will enable even greater productivity and better data management, yielding the insights needed to accelerate the drive to continuous improvement.
Burcin KaplanogluÂ
Executive Director and Innovation Officer
Oracle Construction & Engineering
Tel: +44 (0)207 5626 827
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