Our new distribution centre opens in 2028. It will be the largest building we have ever run, about forty thousand square metres, with high bay racking, a robot zone and a yard for two hundred trailers. This year, for the first time, we were offered a choice of wireless network for it: Wi-Fi, as at every other site, or a private mobile network of our own, licensed for that one site.
The second option interested me more than I expected. In our current depots Wi-Fi is the most common source of complaints from the floor. Scanners lose their connection as they move between access points, coverage changes when the racking fills, and the yard is out of reach altogether. A private network handles movement between cells the way a phone network does, covers a yard from a handful of masts, and can guarantee each device its share of capacity, which matters when some of those devices are moving machinery. In the UK the regulator licenses spectrum for local networks of this kind for a modest fee, and the equipment has become affordable for a single site.
What it would do to my department is less obvious. We would hold a radio licence, with conditions about interference and our neighbours. We would issue our own SIM cards, so adding a device would look like a mobile operator's process rather than a network administrator's. Planning coverage becomes radio engineering, and the people who understand it today work for carriers and integrators, not for companies like ours. And none of our monitoring, security tools or service desk scripts know what a cell is.
I think a good share of large logistics sites will run networks like this within ten years, and that IT departments in my position will become small radio operators without anybody quite deciding it. We are trying to decide it on purpose. The new site will open with Wi-Fi inside the offices and a private network for the yard and the robot zone, where the case is clearest. Two of my engineers are training on it now, a year before anything is installed. The licence, the SIMs and the radio plan will be in our asset register and our change process from the first day, rather than living with the integrator.
For twenty years we bought wireless as a commodity. On a site of this size it is turning into infrastructure we would license, plan and operate ourselves.
– Serguey Shinder
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