The University of Surrey has officially opened its 5G Innovation Centre in partnership with Huawei and other industry players. In separate announcements, both organizations spoke of their commitment to the topic of “5G.”
The Innovation Centre will house more than 170 researchers and has already received over $108 million (70 million pounds) of investment. This is the world’s largest academic research center focusing on next-generation mobile and wireless connectivity. The participants include not only academic experts, but major industry partners that are providing investment along with resources in the form of 5G infrastructure and industry expertise. They have already developed technology that enables speeds of 1 terabit per second. To put this in perspective, this is more than 1,000 times faster than the highest “4G” speed. They have also filed over 15 patents.
“While we have already achieved record-breaking speeds, 5G is not only about delivering faster mobile Internet,” explained Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC. “It is a transformative set of technologies that will radically change our private and professional lives by enabling innovative applications and services, such as remote health care, wireless robots, driverless cars and connected homes and cities, removing boundaries between the real and cyber worlds. These capabilities make 5G a ‘special generation’ of connectivity.”
Huawei announced its participation in the 5GIC along with the investment of 5 million pounds to the program as part of its $600 million commitment to 5G research and innovation globally between 2014 and 2018. During yesterday’s opening ceremony Huawei streamed ultra-high-definition video along with a range of “Internet of Things” applications over a 5G air interface on the test bed it helped install on the university’s campus. The video was streamed to a mobile device over an enhanced outdoor mobile network.
The 5G radio network architecture utilized during the test makes use of radio computing architecture, technology that can use a single resource pool and slice it to accommodate different 5G applications. These applications could support such functionality as self-driving vehicles, remote health care, smart city services and ultra-HD video streaming via end-to-end “network slicing.” As 5G deployments look to support use cases instead of general network connectivity, this type of functionality becomes extremely important.
“Huawei is very pleased to be working as part of the team at the 5GIC,” said Tong Wen, IEEE fellow, Huawei wireless CTO and 5G principal scientist. “We are committed to researching and developing future technologies that help build better connected societies, businesses and economies, and ensuring 5G is a success is essential in achieving this. Globally we will work closely with research institutions, operators and small enterprises to turn the 5G dream into reality. The 5GIC will play an important role in this by helping us start testing foundational 5G technologies as early as possible.”
Learn more about the 5GIC in the following video.
Like what you read? Follow me on twitter!
Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
