Optus partnered with electricity provider Endeavour Energy for a new 5G trial to help the telco build a managed IoT and connectivity service wrap to be offered to enterprises.

Funding the trial is the Australian Federal Government’s latest 5G innovation initiative. The initial trial period is set to run for 12 months. It is also set to monitor Endeavour Energy’s infrastructure assets across Penrith and Blacktown in New South Wales. Overall, it aims to enhance Endeavour Energy’s grid reliability and worker safety using real-time analytics.

The managing director of Optus Enterprise, Chris Mitchell, said that: “Over time you'd have satellites giving geospatial coverage across the whole country.”

He further added that: “You'd have drones patrolling areas where there's a high chance of a lightning strike or risk, you potentially have on-the-ground sensors and cameras...all linked via different sorts of networking technology depending on what the actual bandwidth or latency requirements are, then all meshed together into a sense-response, command and control setup.”

Details of the Endeavour: According to Optus, a combination of 5G, cloud, AI, drone technology, and ultra-high-definition cameras will be used to monitor the physical state of infrastructure assets on the electricity grid in real-time. Currently, on-site inspections are carried out manually. In this case, a team of engineers from Endeavour Energy uses a large fleet of vehicles, helicopters, and a team of technicians to physically identify any issues and perform the necessary resolutions.

Still, according to Mitchell, the trials will help Optus understand the nature and bandwidth requirements of high streaming and real-time applications. From this, he stated that: “If you imagine there are drones flying around and it's being streamed back over Unleash live's platform onto Amazon Kinesis streaming cloud, all happening in real-time.” 

“We can see if there’s a fault being detected, get the drone to go back and zoom in and take more footage.” He then added that: “You can imagine an application where that is done fully autonomously.” 

“And then obviously you're looking to drive up preventative maintenance. You can see similar applications in a range of [industries like] when looking at safety aspects, like on a construction site. Anywhere there’s a real-time need to stop something happening...even 30 milliseconds can be the difference between someone being injured and not.”

The trial also aims to validate the possibility of drones operating autonomously. According to the managing director, Optus has already trialled similar applications with the ANU, The Minderoo Foundation and the ACT Rural Fire Service.