General Motors and Honeywell are among the first companies to adopt Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service inside corporate facilities, to help accelerate digital transformation. Both companies are working with Verizon on customised use cases. General Motors is installing Verizon 5G at its Factory Zero plant at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Centre, including in the corporate office buildings. Honeywell is implementing 5G at its new headquarters building in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The operator is also working with Apple to showcase new industrial applications of private and indoor 5G, including anomoly detection and manufacturing inspection, on-device machine learning, and device-based Augmented Reality for equipment maintenance and industrial documentation.

The greatly expanded capacity of 5G will help accelerate deployment of future innovations in advanced automotive manufacturing at GM’s recently announced Detroit-Hamtramck plant. In addition, 5G supports wider use of devices like the new iPhones 12 line-up used to run apps supporting quality, safety and efficiency in the manufacturing environment.

Known as Factory ZERO, the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Centre is an all-electric vehicle (EV) assembly plant. The plant is intended to advance GM’s vision for a zero-crashes, zero-emissions and zero-congestion future. Factory ZERO will be the launchpad for GM’s multi-brand EV strategy. The facility will utilise Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in addition to other advanced technology.

“Factory ZERO is GM’s flagship assembly plant in our journey to an all-electric future,” said Randy Mott, GM Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “This is another example of cutting-edge technology improving quality and speed as GM accelerates its roll-out of EVs.”

Honeywell is installing Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband inside their new corporate headquarters in Charlotte. The service will serve their Innovation Center and Executive Leadership floor, where they will showcase different Honeywell products and solutions that benefit from the high bandwidth and low latency provided by Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband.

“I am super excited to deploy 5G in our state-of the art corporate headquarters where we will provide an unparalleled showcase of Honeywell products that help make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable,” said Sheila Jordan, Chief Digital Technology Officer at Honeywell.

According to Verizon, indoor 5G Ultra Wideband installations within enterprise customer facilities are a critical step in the process to deliver a commercial private 5G solution. Private 5G could lead to advancements in business operations, product manufacturing and customer experiences across a variety of industries. With Verizon’s mmWave bandwidth and reliability, private 5G should eventually offer the scalability to manage massive numbers of devices along with advanced capabilities such as Edge AI, computer vision and other emerging technologies.

Verizon has also sealed a deal with Apple encourage uptake of the new Apple iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 makes possible a number of new industrial and enterprise applications.

IBM has developed the Maximo Visual Inspection app, which is designed for iPhone 12 models. Manufacturers can monitor production line defects in real time using on-device machine learning, automating and scaling anomaly detection to drive greater efficiency. Core ML models on iPhone powered by the Neural Engine on A14 Bionic and trained on the IBM AI platform, can transmit images across hundreds of inspection points via a Verizon 5G network inside a manufacturing location.

Augmented Reality specialist JigSpace has built on the Apple’s ARKit and the LiDAR Scanner built into iPhone 12 Pro to provide technical and industrial maintenance AR and documentation app. The tool places 3D AR models called ‘Jigs’ in users’ environments , such as on a table or workspace. With Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband, Jigs, which are often hundreds of megabytes of data, can appear near-instantaneously, making them accessible to field service technicians for viewing repairs, and collaborating live with others.

“If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that the acceleration to digital will only get faster and our customers must seize this moment to scale quickly, and General Motors and Honeywell are two industry-leading companies that are first movers in this area,” said Tami Erwin, CEO of Verizon Business. “We’ve opened the door to the 5G era and have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to completely re-imagine the future of enterprise. Foundational to this is the power of Verizon’s 5G network coupled with our expanding portfolio of enterprise cloud applications and devices, including the powerful, new iPhone 12 lineup.”