Vertical: Agriculture
Application: Farming and equipment manufacturing
Ecosystem: John Deere and its dealers
Private Network: 5G
John Deer’s 5G modems now sit atop its tractors, courtesy of its 5G network. Using over 300 sensors, 140 controllers, and an LTE modem, John Deere’s 8RX tractor equipped with a 60 foot, 24-row planter processes 15,000 measurements per second—the data is collected and sent to the cloud-hosted on Amazon Web Services through the John Deere Operations Center. In addition, an app outlines the performance of each field over time and under different weather conditions. A typical day of planting can send as much as 100 MB of data every second.
During the Covid, remote maintenance services provided by dealers grew 200 percent. As part of its connected farm strategy, John Deere attempts to reduce downtime to zero in agricultural operations. It is replacing its ethernet and WiFi networks with 5G cellular networks for greater flexibility.
Integrating the connected farm with dealers and the manufacturing plants sets the stage of John Deere to earn higher revenues from digital services such as remote maintenance and services to improve productivity on farms.
