Early 5G deployments with the R5020
Mining vehicles, retail failover, police cars, city cameras and autonomous shuttles — where one 5G router landed first, and what each site actually needed from it.
The problem
Rather than one customer's problem, these deployments share a set of constraints: limited or inconsistent 5G coverage, industrial and mobile installation requirements, network failover across distributed retail sites, high-volume data transfer from vehicles and cameras, secure authentication for public safety, device management hosted locally rather than in the cloud, short delivery and deployment timeframes, regional certification requirements, and integration with existing customer networks.
What was done
The R5020 sat as the 5G layer between field equipment and the customer's network or application platform — connecting mining vehicles, retail network infrastructure, police vehicles, surveillance cameras, autonomous shuttle buses and research equipment. RCMS, or a locally deployed RCMS Stack where cloud management wasn't acceptable, handled device monitoring. Individual projects also called for GPS, Power over Ethernet input, local management and customised wireless security.
How it turned out
The set shows the range of environments the R5020 was evaluated and installed in: more than 1,000 routers on connected mining vehicles at a single coal operation, a 173-store UK retail programme using it for internet-backbone failover, vehicle-to-station transfer for a police fleet with WPA2 Enterprise and TLS certificate support, bandwidth-heavy camera connectivity on a smart-city project, and integration into an autonomous shuttle bus.
Deployed at the time
As named in the original case study. Some of it is superseded, or was never in our range.
- Robustel R5020 5G router
- RCMS and locally deployed RCMS Stack
What we'd specify today
Current equivalents from our catalogue for this kind of site — not a statement about the hardware installed.
Where this came from
Based on Robustel R5020 early-adopter presentation material created and updated in 2023. The source does not provide consistent performance measurements across the projects — there are no verified figures for 5G throughput, latency, availability, failover time, cost saving, productivity or safety outcome. Customer counts describe the position at that time. The R5020 is one of the two stories where the hardware named is exactly what we stock today.