Houston oilfield telecommunications company Infrastructure Networks has partnered with the Finnish cell phone equipment giant Nokia to bring fifth generation mobile data service to the Permian Basin and three other shale plays.

In a joint statement released on Monday morning, the two companies announced that they have completed work to install 5G-ready transmitters and receivers at cell phone towers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico as well as the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas, the SCOOP/STACK shale play in Oklahoma and the Bakken Shale of North Dakota.

Crews from both companies completed a project to install Nokia Airscale Radio Access Network and Wavence Microwave equipment on cell phone towers either owned or used by Infrastructure Networks. The equipment upgrades allowed Infrastructure Networks to expand its 4G LTE coverage area and laid the physical groundwork to provide gigabit-speed 5G service to oil and natural gas industry customers.

“Operators, drillers and oilfield service companies can now embrace automation, artificial intelligence analytics and machine learning, only made accessible with next generation, high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity,” Infrastructure Networks CEO Mark Slaughter said in a statement.

Service Sector: Houston company seeks to develop first 5G-enabled oil drilling site

Infrastructure Networks is bidding on providing data services to two large-scale oil drilling projects in the Permian Basin, which could potentially become the first commercial use of 5G in the oil field.

As oil and natural gas operations become more digitized and automated, 5G cell phone networks promise to move 1 gigabit of data per second, allowing users to send larger and more complex data such as video in the blink of an eye.

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