Vertical: Ports
Application: Autonomous electric trucks, remote-controlled cranes, predictive maintenance, drone inspection and environmental monitoring, video analytics
Ecosystem: Three Group Solutions, Boldyn Networks
Private Network: 5G
Three Group Solutions has completed the rollout of a private 5G network across Hutchison Ports’ UK operations at the Port of Felixstowe, Harwich International Port, and London Thamesport. The project, announced in January 2026, brings a unified, industrial-grade connectivity platform to what amounts to the beating heart of British container trade — and it represents a significant step forward from a deployment story that has been building for years.
The news builds on a three-year-old private 5G proof-of-concept project and a five-year-old private 4G setup at Felixstowe. That earlier work was focused on a narrower set of use cases — primarily predictive maintenance of cranes using IoT sensors and communications for remote-controlled yard cranes. What has been completed now is a different proposition entirely: a production-grade, multi-site network purpose-built for the demands of large-scale autonomous operations.
A key driver for the upgrade is Hutchison Ports’ major rollout plan to introduce autonomous electric trucks at the Port of Felixstowe, replacing a significant proportion of the existing diesel fleet. These vehicles demand continuous connectivity, very low latency for safe remote intervention, and the bandwidth to support multiple live video feeds when operators need to inspect a situation in detail. The previous 4G system was highly reliable for delivering work instructions to tablets in vehicle cabs but was not designed to support these demands at scale.
Three Group Solutions handled the deployment alongside shared network specialist Boldyn Networks. The engineering challenge was not simply one of performance — it was one of continuity. Upgrading the mission-critical communications in a live port environment required a carefully staged migration. Three Group Solutions designed and built the 5G network in parallel with the existing 4G system, using different blocks of radio spectrum so that both networks could operate side by side without interference. This allowed vehicles and machinery to be moved across in controlled phases, with performance monitored and optimized at each step.
Graham Wilde, Head of Private Networks at Three Group Solutions, framed the challenge plainly: “When you are dealing with the connectivity that keeps the country’s largest container port moving, you cannot simply turn one network off and another on. By running the 4G and 5G systems in parallel and moving assets in stages, we were able to deliver a smooth transition with no disruption to daily operations.”
Working with a small number of specialist technology partners, Three Group Solutions delivered a resilient, scalable 5G architecture with dual cores, overlapping radio coverage, and diverse links between the three ports. Three The network sits wholly within Hutchison Ports’ existing cybersecurity perimeter and is engineered to maintain operations even if individual sites or towers are taken offline for maintenance, or in the event of a fault. That kind of designed-in resilience matters when the stakes are a port that handles nearly half of the UK’s containerized trade.
The immediate focus of the new network is autonomous horizontal transport, but the architecture was built with broader ambitions in mind. Future use cases could include extending remote control to more types of machinery including cranes, deploying sensors for predictive maintenance, using drones for inspection and environmental monitoring, or integrating video analytics and real-time data into digital twins of port operations. As Wilde put it: “The capability of the new network means that possibilities for the future are only really limited by the imagination of what could be done.”
One theme that Wilde returned to repeatedly is the human dimension of port automation — a subject that tends to attract skepticism from labor advocates. “Automation in ports is not about putting people out of work. It is about changing the jobs people do. Roles become safer, more varied and more attractive, which makes it easier to recruit and retain the talent ports need for the future.” It is a measured position, and one worth noting as autonomous vehicles begin displacing diesel fleets at an increasing number of major terminals worldwide.
“Felixstowe, Harwich, and Thamesport now have a dedicated 5G foundation for the next decade of innovation,” Wilde said at the completion of the project. Whether that foundation holds up to those ambitions will depend on how quickly Hutchison Ports and its technology partners can move from proof of concept to full operational deployment across the range of use cases the network was designed to support. For now, the infrastructure is in place — and the autonomous trucks are already rolling.
