Orange Business Services Deploys 4G at Butachimie Plant

2021: Creating a Private Mobile Network

The international service provider Orange Business Services and telecom company Nokia has deployed a private mobile network at an innovative polymer plant. Butachimie The network at the factory in Alsace France () will become the basis of the Butachimie digital transformation project, the purpose of which is to modernize and optimize production. Orange Business Services announced this on November 10, 2021.

Butachimie, a major producer of intermediate polymer products for nylon, has begun digitizing processes from production security and data to new business scenarios. To meet the challenges and anticipate the needs of Butachimie's future factory, Orange Business Services has developed a fully redundant and secure 4G private mobile network with the ability to upgrade to 5G.

This cascaded private network is based on Nokia Core Network and Radio Access Network (RAN) solutions. With this, Butachimie has acquired controlled and efficient access to IT applications and can use services through wireless connected equipment in real time. Both the equipment and the collected data will have a high network availability of more than 99.99%, which prevents crashes and ensures continuous production.

Our digital transformation and modernization plan must meet stringent security and availability requirements. Therefore, it is important for us to be able to rely on reliable partners who can provide technological reliability, individual support and deep knowledge of our business, as well as related work scenarios, "said Stéphane Cazabonne, Butachimie Project Director. - Thanks to Orange Business Services and Nokia, we are opening the next stage in the development of our factory of the future, offering employees more convenient working conditions and ensuring productivity and competitiveness in their segment. This scalable network will ultimately benefit from the performance of technologies such as 5G.

From the very beginning, Orange Business Services and Butachimie worked closely when deploying the network, in particular, when developing scenarios for its industrial use to solve specific tasks of the enterprise. Several scenarios were selected, including real-time geolocation (within one meter), push-to-talk with internal communication, process digitization and a tool for managing enterprise communication devices.

With expertise in mobile networking, cybersecurity, and business application development, Orange Business Services provides consulting and technical services for comprehensive network management and use case management in the 4.0 industry. Starting from the design stage, Orange Business Services has taken into account the scalability of a private mobile network, in particular, by developing an architecture adapted for mobile edge computing.

This private 4G mobile network has become the basis for future applications that are being developed as part of the Butachimie digital transformation project.