Some 80% of New Zealand’s wine is grown and produced in the Marlborough region, making Port Nelson a critical trading gateway for the island nation. The busy port also ships forestry products, dairy, and seafood. In 2025, during a time of global trading challenges and domestic economic difficulties, 3.2m tons of goods were moved through the port, with wine as one of the best performers.
“We’ve just celebrated 10 years where we organize supply-chain solutions for glass bottles coming in, and glass bottles going over the hill, getting filled, and the wine coming back,” says Reagan Pattison, general manager of business transformation at Port Nelson.
Despite solid economic results, some areas of the business were underperforming, and Port Nelson went into 2026 with a mission to lift productivity and bolster safety. However, persistent Wi‑Fi dead spots, dropouts, and inefficiencies in warehouse operations were hampering efforts to reach growth targets. “Connectivity was becoming a real operational constraint for us,” says Pattison.
Trial and error in searching for Wi-Fi improvements
Within the warehouses, palletized bottled wine and empty wine bottles are moved in and out of the port, and forklift operators scan every pallet moved as part of inventory and logistics processes. But there were problems. High‑density stacked storage in the warehouses, along with the complex design of the broader port site, blocked Wi-Fi in many areas, leading to operating problems and employee aggravation.
“Staff frustration was coming up in a lot of different forums, where Wi‑Fi was being raised as the issue, and people were having to change their process because they couldn’t get a consistent connection with the Wi‑Fi,” Pattison says.
Interference was also coming from Bluetooth and electric forklifts, and, at night, the system faced dropouts due to an uptick in residential wireless internet usage. “One of the most ridiculous ones we’ve found was when the forklift reverses, they have a blue light that shines out the back, and that signal was also interrupting the Wi-Fi signal,” Pattison explains.
The team tried various solutions like scans, additional access points, and new equipment, but they struggled to improve connectivity. “No matter how much we tried to saturate our warehouses with Wi‑Fi, we couldn’t get consistent performance. That impacted productivity, created frustration for our operators, and limited our ability to modernize how we work,” says Pattison.
Establishing a new warehouse site at nearby Blenheim was an opportunity to install new equipment, with the hope that the Wi-Fi signal problems would ease. “We hypothesized that it was the age of the equipment and some of the devices we were running causing the problem. But when we set up the new site, it was the same problem,” he tells Network World.
There were also new considerations. A safety incident several years back led Port Nelson to explore technologies such as computer vision and push-to-talk platforms to improve safety and efficiency. “We ran a proof of concept in our warehouse, to see if our existing CCTV cameras with AI could manage the proximity of people and machinery moving in a confined space,” he says.
Additionally, the business was responding to government signals about strengthening its cybersecurity posture. “In New Zealand, like just about everywhere else in the world, there’s a real focus around protecting critical infrastructure and the impact of being offline,” he says.
Pattison came across private 5G as an alternative to Wi-Fi and presented it to the board. Despite initial reservations, the board signed off after seeing the need for other options to lift productivity and improve safety controls.
To build the business case, Pattison needed to tie the business benefits to the cost while also fully outlining the amount required for alternatives.
“There’s no hiding from the fact that there’s some big numbers associated with that … and it’s a mix of capex and opex,” he says. “Even if we were trying to solve the Wi‑Fi issue in isolation, 30,000 square meters of warehousing and other operational areas—the cost of hardware, devices, labor … if you build that out, that’s a reasonably high cost.”
How a 5G proof of concept showed the way
When considering Wi-Fi alternatives, Pattison opted against technical surveys that would produce granular results on coverage and dropouts. “We could have gone very deep into the surveys, but I didn’t want to spend money to tell me what I already know,” he says.
Instead, a proof of concept with New Zealand telecommunications company Spark and Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions improved connectivity significantly and showed it was the right solution for the port.
“With Wi-Fi, it’s being delivered from access points that are 15 meters up on a ceiling, and we’re not getting connectivity. But using Spark public 5G from a tower 500 meters away, we were getting a strong connection,” Pattison says. That performance bode well for the on-site deployment. “Knowing private 5G would be broadcast from a radio up in the corner of the warehouse, we were really confident about the signal strength and the connectivity,” he says.
Spark’s private 5G network covers around 30,000 square meters across three warehouses in Nelson and Blenheim. It uses Ericsson private 5G gear to provide a high-availability core at Port Nelson that connects to small cell radios to provide reliable coverage inside the warehouses and across outdoor yard areas.
In addition, the port deployed Ericsson Cradlepoint ruggedized R1900 routers for forklift connectivity and tracking. The routers have a dual-SIM capability that lets them switch between Spark’s public and private 5G networks when forklifts move outside the initial private 5G coverage areas.
Instead of tying success to purely technical measures, Pattison is focused on how it translates to operational improvements. “We’re going to get a marked improvement in connectivity and that means reduced work from an operational point of view, which obviously leads to efficiency and throughput gain,” he says.
In addition to productivity gains, Ericsson’s NetCloud platform gives Port Nelson improved visibility into connectivity performance, helping teams proactively identify and resolve issues.
“Private 5G gives us the ability to prioritize critical communications, improve visibility of what’s happening across the site, and move towards more proactive, engineered safety controls,” he says.
A new foundation for growth
Pattison says the private 5G network paves the way for the port to improve communications and adopt new technologies. Enhanced CCTV cameras, AI‑enabled vision, and automation should deliver ongoing improvements in both productivity and health and safety outcomes.
Like other operational sites, the port uses analog simplex radios that use a single, shared frequency, but the range is limited and only one person can speak at a time. It’s another communications constraint. “Moving around the port, it’s not what we would term positive comms,” he says.
Pattison has long wanted to improve the system and has now implemented a push-to-talk (PTT) communication platform over the private 5G network. Mindful of the change management component, the PTT project team started with Marlborough and is gradually augmenting existing radio channels at the main Nelson site.
The PTT system will also help strengthen health and safety outcomes by improving real‑time communications and enabling location‑based alerts using cameras and sensors to help physically separate people from heavy equipment found at the port. “When you’re in the big cranes, the biggest issue is visibility because the operators are blind to what’s happening around them,” Pattison says.
“If we can geofence a particular piece of equipment— say, the enormous ship-to-shore container cranes, or those that operate in a zone on the wharf — we could use push-to-talk and alerts when things move in and out of that zone.”
Looking ahead, there are more plans to improve operations now that the network is in place and reliable connectivity is available across its various sites. Predictive maintenance and real-time tracking on forklifts, containers, and cranes will let the team better manage machine diagnostics and utilization data. “Now with 5G we could get that set up a lot quicker,” he says.
The port is also exploring the use of drones for health and safety and operational efficiency, including nighttime warehouse operations and terminal checks.
“Drones can look at the tops of buildings and remove that health and safety risk so we don’t have to send people up there,” he says. “We’re also looking at drones operating in our warehouses during downtime at night doing cycle counts for inventory checks.”
Drones can also be used to perform checks on containers after high winds, another health and safety benefit. “We close the terminal when the wind blows in a certain street from a certain direction, but we don’t know without going through and checking things whether containers and stacks have moved because of the wind.”
Pattison says the lessons learned include understanding the root cause of issues, testing solutions, and considering the broader benefits of private 5G beyond just replacing Wi-Fi.
“It’s not just private 5G to solve a Wi-Fi problem; it’s actually private 5G to enable our wider digital program at work, and it’s going to be with us for many years.”