AT&T Joins MxD Manufacturing Research Institute to Boost 5G and Edge Tech

In a recent release, AT&T and MxD announced they are working together to accelerate the deployment of 5G to the U.S. manufacturing industry. AT&T will collaborate with MxD to install 5G technology and Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) within MxD’s Chicago innovation center dedicated to advancing manufacturing innovation.

“AT&T will bring a new perspective to our mission of helping U.S. manufacturers build every part better than the last,” said Chandra Brown, CEO, MxD. “This is the first time we will bring a communications technology provider into our institute. By including AT&T’s 5G network into our manufacturing testbed, our partners will get firsthand access to 5G technology to co-create use cases and test advanced digital manufacturing applications for the future of the industry.”

MxD, formerly the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII), is a non-profit that brings partners together to advance the future of the U.S. manufacturing industry. Its innovation center offers its partners an environment to focus on developing, demonstrating, deploying, and commercializing innovations that address manufacturing’s most pressing problems.

“5G has real potential to be one of the platforms that truly unleashes the power of Industry 4.0”, said Jeff Wilcox, VP, Enterprise Transformation at Lockheed Martin and MxD Board Member.  “We see the lower latency and high bandwidth of 5G as being key to creating the communication and processing infrastructure at the heart of the smart factory ecosystem.”

AT&T will install 5G millimeter wave technology to cover parts of MxD’s 22,000 square foot factory floor. AT&T said it also expects to bring industry related technologies, applications, and new collaborations to the research space to test manufacturing-related 5G use cases such as Industrial IoT, predictive maintenance, remote machine monitoring, autonomous robots, mixed reality training and spatial computing.

In addition, AT&T plans to test and showcase its MEC solution. Using MEC, MxD partners will be able to test manufacturing capabilities that use locally-processed data for faster processing and lower latency, while boosting security in cloud services.

“This is another example of our dedication to using 5G to transform businesses across the U.S.,” said Mo Katibeh, CMO, AT&T Business. “MxD is a premier leader in driving innovation for the manufacturing industry. By bringing 5G into their experiential testbed, we get to work with leading manufacturing companies to help drive new experiences and innovation not only today, but into the future.”