A 5G Suez Canal Would Almost Certainly be a Much Safer One

5G MVNO is the subject of two new papers from Enghouse Networks – read on to discover a flavour of the new opportunities that are about to be unlocked.

What’s to stop a mobile virtual network enabler set up in business tomorrow to market a highly specialised, highly-tuned MVNO service for shipping containers?

Before you answer the specific question, you might logically ask why we’d need such a service anyway: who’d pay for it? Well, 12% of global trade, around a million barrels of oil and roughly 8% of all the world’s consumption of liquefied natural gas pass through the Suez Canal every day.

You may not have known that it was quite that high—but after the Ever Given grounding earlier this year, you will certainly be a lot more aware than you used to be of just how important a global business artery that 193.30 km of waterway is. You will also now be a lot more familiar with just how much gets pushed down it daily, too; the container ship in question was a pretty big ship for sure, at 400m and 200,000 tonnes… but it was still just one big ship.

Current estimates are that that just one ship colliding into the side of the Canal and getting stuck for six days in March prevented $10bn worth of global supply chain getting through. Turns out the global supply chain (which is, of course, made up of many, many such local, regional and trans-national connections) is really rather fragile. The EMSA Marine Casualty report from 2011-2019 said no less than 25,214 ships were involved in accidents in that timeframe; such marine incidents cost $197 million in losses in a year (2017 data).

You may have started to see where I’m going with all this. There is a lot riding on getting maritime trade going as smoothly as possible. Operators and manufacturing and distribution conglomerates would be quite interested, one would think, in a medium that gave them precise and IoT-level insight into just how their ships were doing and what potential problems they might need to immediately react to.

A local network, self-contained and operated across a fleet of vessels from a global logistics company could provide the means to obtain and access this data – particularly if on-board coverage was married with off-shore connectivity.

You could easily imagine such a service running on a 5G core, as that’s the level of low latency but high bandwidth and data capacity you’d want to see here—connecting to Canal- and port-side towers, perhaps, zipping useful data around at high speed for captains, managers and indeed, impatient customers. With this infrastructure in place, different MVNOs could capitalise on it, to run different services for stakeholders across the industry.

Which brings us back to that MVNO proposition I tabled at the start of the blog. If you agree that such a service is actually really interesting and offers enormous potential, then you’ll be rather cheered to know there is nothing stopping an MVNO doing just that.

You may already know that in the new world of the 5G, stakeholders from a slew of industries are lining up to take advantage of new levels of connectivity and performance. You may not know that this also means that completely new, 5G-based, MVNO use cases are on the horizon, too. Now’s the time to explore what these mean and how you can play your part in shaping the 5G MVNO.

A closing thought. Would such a service have prevented the disaster and all the ensuing chaos? Perhaps not; 5G wasn’t driving the boat.

But what if the boat had been able to be warned of the risk of that form of manoeuvre? Quite.