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Fifty 'Connected Cows' Already Have 5G (reuters.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the moo-moo-here dept.

A herd of dairy cows in the U.K. "are enjoying the benefits of 5G connectivity before you," reports Reuters: For the cows, among the 5G-connected gadgets they are wearing is a collar that controls a robotic milking system. When the cow feels ready to be milked it will approach machine gates that will automatically open. The device recognizes the individual to precisely latch on to its teats for milking, while the cow munches on a food reward. At the government-funded Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation Centre (Agri-EPI Centre) in Shepton Mallet, in southwest England, around 50 of the 180-strong herd is fitted with the 5G smart collars and health-monitoring ear tags.
But -- why?! The Verge explains: According to Reuters, Cisco is testing infrastructure for the eventual global rollout of 5G that could be used by various industries that are not traditionally in the tech bubble but are still dependent on increasingly sophisticated hardware and software. That includes farming. In this case, Cisco is trying out 5G in three rural locations...

It makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it: farms are large and spread-out spaces, and cows are often shuffled between grazing grounds and areas of the farm where they can be more easily milked and checked on. With the 5G collars, Cisco says farmers can keep tabs on the animals at all times of the day without having to physically trek out to observe the cows up close... The future is wonderful and weird, and farmers have access to it before you and I because without them, we all starve.

"We can connect every cow, we can connect every animal on this farm," Cisco's Nick Chrissos told Reuters, in what may be the strangest boast a Cisco executive has ever uttered in public. "That's what 5G can do for farming -- really unleash the power that we have within this farm, everywhere around the UK and everywhere around the world."

37 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Why does this need 5G? by raburton · · Score: 1

    Not sure what 5G has got to do with this. Not a lot of detail, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't work on 4G, 3G or 2G for that matter.

    1. Re:Why does this need 5G? by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Informative

      Lower power and extra features such as high resolution location tracking. Check out LWPA and narrowband iot.

      Also, older technologies are being phased out so that the spectrum can be reallocated. If you target something like 2G now, you may run into diminishing coverage soon.

    2. Re:Why does this need 5G? by magarity · · Score: 2

      Not sure what 5G has got to do with this. Not a lot of detail, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't work on 4G, 3G or 2G for that matter.

      Dairy farms do indeed already have this kind of thing and have for years. Maybe the carrier is just doing animal testing on its new product?

    3. Re: Why does this need 5G? by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Informative

      2G specifically would have severe scalability problems. AFAIK, each 2G data link is basically a circuit-switched voice call that skips the modem part and goes straight to the bitstream. In landline terms... kind of like ISDN. The point is, if a given tower is provisioned to handle ~24 simultaneous voice calls, each 2G data connection eats up one of those slots for its duration.

      So... 2G might work if the collars connected only infrequently, for a few seconds, and had the ability to wait random delays before attempting the next connection... but even a single herd with a few thousand cattle attempting to "phone home" daily would probably have a noticeable impact on at least a single tower's capacity.

      3G could handle daily uploads without breaking a sweat, but would run into problems if collars tried to treat it like an "always on" connection. AFAIK, no single tower in a 3g network can handle more than a single subnet, and IP leases are (usually) for an hour, so after the first {n} radios connect and establish a session, nothing else can connect until users from the first {n} go away and stay away for the remaining duration of their lease.

      I'm not sure how much of 3G's limit is hard-baked in to the standard itself, vs the de-facto limits imposed by off the shelf hardware, software, and configurations used by carriers out of habit, but I know 3G doesn't deal well with situations that involve HUGE numbers of transient users over a short window of time... the crowd blows through the tower site's DHCP pool, and for a while nobody else can connect at all.

      I think 3G's max tower-users-per-time-interval can be tweaked upwards (by allocating more IP addresses per tower, reducing DHCP lease times, etc), but the point is that an "average" 3g tower with typical urban-suburban configuration would probably have issues if a farmer suddenly lit up tens of thousands of 3G radio collars over the span of a few days without at least coordinating it with the cellular network (to give it a few months to re-provision the affected tower site with a more appropriate configuration).

      The point is, it goes beyond merely "total bits per second". There are also limits on the total number of user sessions per time-interval, and those limits can become significant if an area suddenly experiences an unanticipated surge in total connections, even if they aren't transmitting more than a few bytes of payload data apiece.

      4G mainly gives enough headroom to make "lots of ephemeral connections from lots of users within a short interval of time" less of a problem. It HAD to, because the rapid emergence of Android & Iphone (all continuously making network requests in the background) pushed existing 3G networks to the breaking point. A 3G tower next to a 14-lane freeway that might have once served a few thousand users who "went online" deliberately suddenly had tens of thousands of users per hour driving by & establishing data sessions so they could ping Facebook or Twitter in the background. 4G had other benefits, but the increase in the default connection limit per tower site between middle-stage 3G and early 4G was a big one. It's also why it's legit to call HSPA "4G"... a tower configured for HSPA can basically handle as many connections per hour as a LTE tower of the same era, and WAY more than the same tower could back when it first went online in early-3G UMTS form. It's not as efficient as LTE, but most of the hard limits users associate with "3G" are gone.

      Ditto, for 4G vs 5G. If you only care about ping times & speedtest benchmarks, a pimped-out LTE tower with lots of low AND high-frequency spectrum doesn't look all that different to end users than a "5G" tower with the same spectrum and users. 5G's benefits are mostly in the "efficiency" realm, plus features like enhanced location-positioning (basically, every 5G tower broadcasts a periodic beacon with GPS-like timestamp that can be combined with a database of known tower locations and acts like a terrestrial GPS satellite). I'm pretty sure 4G d

    4. Re:Why does this need 5G? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Not sure what 5G has got to do with this.

      Cisco is just trying to create confusion between themselves and Sysco, the food service company. People will hear about connected cows, think about how great an investment food service is these days, and accidentally buy Cisco stock.

    5. Re:Why does this need 5G? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      Not sure what 5G has got to do with this. Not a lot of detail, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't work on 4G, 3G or 2G for that matter.

      Well... respectively, it has 1, 2, and 3 more G's. So ...

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    6. Re:Why does this need 5G? by dknj · · Score: 1

      5G operates using Ultra Wide Band technology. That is, you assign the device a set of frequencies, and it will monitor and attempt to communicate over all of those frequencies. So you can have 900mhz, 2.4ghz, and 28ghz assigned which pretty much covers you through all situations. This is why UHF, 2G, 3G and soon 4G bands are looking delicious to anyone who owns them (or is able to bid in the next auction).

      5G is a buzzword, but it is the reality of our future. I can't see how we progress beyond 5G because of it's sheer technical feat (we shall see)

      -dk

    7. Re:Why does this need 5G? by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      LWPA and NB-IoT networks already exist. They aren't part of the 5G standards, are they? Or have they been co-opted?

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    8. Re: Why does this need 5G? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      why. vegans are the only folks whose diet doesn't contribute to the necessity of farmers perpetually raping cows then killing their offspring to ensure maximum milk production

    9. Re: Why does this need 5G? by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      Just to add another example of how 5G could offer improved location service...

      GPS works by having a constellation of satellites with very accurate clocks onboard that periodically broadcast a timestamped beacon. At the receiving end, you note the (local) time the beacon was heard.

      Then, you look up the coordinates, motion vector, and timestamp of the satellite's last ephemera update, then calculate where it OUGHT to be as of the instant specified in the timestamp... and repeat for all the satellites in view. Because satellite orbits drift over time, the ephemera data has to be updated periodically (ironically, I think the GPS satellites determine THEIR OWN locations by triangulation from similar beacons at precisely-known locations on earth).

      Once you know where each satellite was located at the instant of their timestamp, you can derive your own location (by comparing your own clock's timestamps on each beacon datagram with those from the satellite, based on the speed of light & known signal-propagation characteristics).

      You might see a catch-22... your phone's clock isn't as accurate as the clocks in the GPS satellites, and there's always going to be a degree of uncertainty if you have to set it BASED UPON a consensus of GPS satellites & local towers. HOWEVER, if a tower's physical location is precisely determined by surveyors, its clock-setting logic can use that information to derive a more precise time from GPS satellites (basically, adjusting its own clock until the locations derived from GPS match the location determined by the surveyor). And phones can precisely set their own clocks, because the speed of light over a mile or so is practically instantaneous compared to the distance to a GPS satellite.

      The main limit with 5G is the stability of the antenna & support structure itself. I think one difference between 4g and 5g is that 5g ALSO reports its predicted margin of error & confidence, and might do additional tower-site logic to take things like tower-sway into account. Because otherwise, you might calculate a location that claims to be within 33mm, but could vary by 12 feet due to the antenna being mounted on a tower that's swaying by 12 feet at the tip. When you start trying to get THAT kind of precision, uncertainty about the location of the antenna ITSELF becomes a big deal.

      Conceivably, a 5G tower that wanted to be extraordinarily accurate as a location source could use additional sensors to measure that moment-to-moment deviation. Not just accelerometer & gyro, but also cameras observing it from different angles, anemometers coupled with the tower's known flexure at a given temperature & wind speed, etc... and providing a way to obtain (via side-channel) the additional raw sensor data, so clients won't have to be limited by the software running at the tower site itself. Someone (like a researcher) COULD actually grab the "raw" data, and do his own calculations with it. Basically, the goal with 5G was to avoid imposing arbitrary limits. You can get precise location data now, but you could potentially get MORE precise data in the future as the sensors & certifications of the site improve, better algorithms are discovered, etc.

      Remember... EVERY measurement ALWAYS has some degree of uncertainty... and some sensors are a lot more "uncertain" than others. You can take advantage of known parameters (like location surveyed with high precision), but ultimately EVERYTHING is at least slightly wrong. For a perfect example, think back to analog paddle controllers back in the "Atari" era. Even with low-res displays, you had at least a few pixels of frame-to-frame jitter. No sensor EVER gives you a 100% accurate instantaneous reading. It's just how sensors ARE. You can improve accuracy by oversampling & integrating readings from multiple sensors, but ultimately... every reading is STILL an educated guess.

  2. Mooooo. by geekmux · · Score: 1

    Beta testing 5G on that herd, in order to prepare it for another herd.

    At least we've been upgraded from lemmings. Or at least on paper we have.

  3. Is 5G really relevant here? by az-saguaro · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am no expert on anything related to wireless and broadband services, but something about this report seems a bit over-hyped, or am I missing something?

    5G promises higher bandwidth and speed, but it does it also extend range? Does this a allow rancher's or farmer's cow's to communicate over a 50 mile ranch because 4G didn't do it? And if it's just a 50 acre spread with cell towers nearby, how does 5G help? It sounds like the applications, "Bessie phone home" to report that she hooked up to Mr. Milky is a rather low bandwidth need. Your old 2400 baud modem would probably suffice. If the intent is to download live video from a 500 head herd at once, maybe, or if you plan to download video so Bessie can watch the latest Star Wars movies and sour the milk, okay. But otherwise I do not understand how 5G is any better for this than any other telemetry technology of the past 15 years?

    Or is this just a slow news day or marketing cow manure?
    Can someone please enlighten me.

    1. Re:Is 5G really relevant here? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      5G promises higher bandwidth and speed

      Higher bandwidth and speed is very useful for short messages, because it means that your transmitter only needs to be enabled for a very short burst, saving power.

  4. Bring back the old strap line. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Slashdot, Moos for herds.

  5. Wrong answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Depending on where you are, 2G is NOT going to be phased out any time soon. In fact, many places'll likely end up phasing out 3G and possibly 4G before 2G. Moreover, the only real place where the cows need coverage is the barn. So something that uses a short range telemetry band will work just fine, and probably use far less power to boot. It certainly isn't dependent on third party telco conglomerates and government planning and zoning approval to track your cows.

    So the correct answer is: Publicity stunt.

    1. Re:Wrong answer by Bert64 · · Score: 2

      You may want tracking of animals outside of the barn, incase they escape...
      Other than that you'd generally only need it inside the barn or farm area.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    2. Re:Wrong answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Low data rate telemetry in a relatively low frequency band (915 MHz, 868 Mhz, 433 MHz, ...) can get to kilometres easy in the open field. Especially in rural areas where there's little interference from other sources. Might want to put your base station nice and high up a pole in a central spot among your lands. Costs a bit but saves on telco bills for each cow. Besides, if we're talking Australian outback where single ranches might each cover the area of small European countries, 5G coverage might well be spottier than anything you yourself can put up.

      Of course, if "everyone" is using "5G" for "IoT" "anyway", then the economics to rely on a telco in your area might work out. But just as I don't see the need to make my fridge phone in orders to the grocer without me in the loop, I don't see why I'd rely on a third party if it's cheaper and simpler and gives me more control to do it myself. It's probably entirely possible to provide "turn key" systems with a local base station and without a telco charging me for the privilege. But if the buzz of "5G" might allow telcos to position themselves as the go-to party for this sort of thing so they can scalp off a nice bit of rent, then they won't fail to try and do exactly that.

  6. fit explosives by Cederic · · Score: 2

    If they add explosives to the 5G collar they can also remotely deal with the next Foot & Mouth outbreak.

    1. Re:fit explosives by chrism238 · · Score: 1

      The 5G collars, from Amazon, have explosives fitted, but they are not enabled.

  7. LoRaWAN makes more sense by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    farms are large and spread-out spaces, and cows are often shuffled between grazing grounds and areas of the farm where they can be more easily milked and checked on.

    It makes no sense to us 5G for this because 5G is for dense areas that need high-speed. LoRaWAN is cheaper, lower power and has a range of over 10 kilometers.

    They might as well use WiFi for the cows. This is stupid.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:LoRaWAN makes more sense by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      It makes no sense to us 5G for this because 5G is for dense areas that need high-speed.

      Presumably, the farmer making a technology choice would check first if the farm was covered by 5G network.

    2. Re:LoRaWAN makes more sense by jimbo · · Score: 1

      Well, while 5G needs GHz bands for dense areas it also works just fine on e.g. traditional 700MHz while still offering a better protocol and better channel management. Thus I guess better handling of a large number of low speed devices connecting to the same cell - like a herd of cattle.

      Better channel management, dynamic bandwidth allocation and a more efficient protocol is what 5G is about.
      Well, for carriers it's really about more revenue opportunities but let's ignore that for now.

    3. Re:LoRaWAN makes more sense by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      and has a range of over 10 kilometers.

      You don't seem to have a firm grasp on the scale of a cattle ranch or dairy. 10 kms, might as well just run a string between some cans.

  8. Next up, virtual reality for cows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Set up each cow with a VR headset so you can herd them without herding them.

  9. And this needs 5G by aglider · · Score: 1

    Interesting! This 5G thing is leading us to a brave New world!

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
  10. Great, even more eggs in one basket... by gweihir · · Score: 1

    It will be spectacular when that infrastructure goes down for a few days...

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  11. Cow Body Temperatures by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 1

    I once worked on a defunct project to track the internal temperature of dairy cows. A rfid transmitter and temperature sensor were encapsulated in a bolus. When the cow walked by a rfid reader panel it would identify the cow and read its temperature. Great Idea but in the end, it wasn't fully funded. I still have a reader panel in my garage.

    1. Re: Cow Body Temperatures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      RFID tags to identify cow when it visits robot milking station seem standard today, and on calves visiting feeding stations, the feeding station makes sure that each animal only get the amount of feed they've been allocated.
      Milking robots that sample the milk, per cow, into an automatic mini lab for analysis, the results sent to the dairy.

      I've also seen wireless collars, technology unknown, that analyzed the rumination behaviour and can detect if the animal is feeling unwell, or is in heat.

      Somehow the tech revolution in dairy farming went unnoticed by me. I'm constantly amazed whenever a farmer calls me for "computer help" ( because the company that installed all the tech is half a day or more away), and I find complex network setups involving multiple firewalls nats and routers, and arrays of WiFi cantennae...

      All in all, I guess wide area localisation is the only area not covered right now. 5G? If it offers low enough power and decent sleep modes, I guess there'd be a benefit?

  12. I like that it's humane by fieldstone · · Score: 2

    This approach might dramatically reduce animals' stress, if they can get milked immediately when needed. Relatedly, less stress means less cortisol, which means more nutritious, better-tasting meat. https://www.atlasobscura.com/a...

  13. Remember 2G? by PPH · · Score: 1

    When the telecoms rolled out stuff like GPRS to support simple packet data applications. And lots of manufacturers embedded 2G GPRS modems in their products? Ant then the telecoms pulled the rug out from under 2G, rendering a lot of expensive equipment useless. Never again. Fooled me one, shame on you. Fool me again, shame on me.

    Cows might not be a great example of this problem, as they are inevitably going to be rotated through a production line. Where new hardware can be fitted and the old stuff retired. Maybe the cellular companies can trade sheep (humans with fondleslabs) up to the latest shiny tech. But businesses have a much longer investment horizon for embedded hardware.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  14. Simpler solution here by St.Creed · · Score: 1

    Just add those extra genes the Chinese researchers recently added to monkeys to the cows as well and have them be smarter about where their food is. Give them a smartwatch to tell the time and we're done.
    The ethics of milking and eating cows that have near-human intelligence are of course, up for debate.

    --
    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  15. Not a substitute for physical health checks by rapjr · · Score: 1

    A sensor in an ear tag or collar is not a substitute for a physical health check. The sensor can not tell if the cow has a rock stuck in its hoof for example, or if the cow has gastrointestinal problems. I worked in this field ten years ago building a multi-hop wireless network on cattle to electronically herd and track them. There are long standing patents on this technology in the US (USDA) and Australia (CSIRO). We decided to stop research after the US prison industry expressed interest.

  16. question by shentino · · Score: 1

    Can you play Cow Clicker with them?

  17. I approached and by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    got a free hand-job. Bad AI, but feels good. 5 Stars!

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  18. Yes, but how do they charge the batteries? by jgfenix · · Score: 1

    That would require human intervention, unless they are wirelessly charged when the cows are milked or something like that.

  19. I don't think 5G is needed by cmaurand · · Score: 1

    A couple of well placed access points on the farm and this whole thing could be done with wifi. No need for big monthly bills from the telco for connecting up a couple of hundred head of cattle. Hell, RFID will tell you which cow just came through the door. Dairy cows don't travel far. they need to return to the milker each morning and evening. That means they are within walking distance of the barn so that drastically reduces the area that you need to cover down to less than 100 acres, most likely 20 or 30 will do. Moreover, the cattle are likely to be in open field, so that make communication even easier. This is just overkill for the need and over hyping 5G

  20. Every hedgehog in Sussex by vandamme · · Score: 1

    .... will get 5G before it comes to my neck of the woods in Upstate NY.