Ericsson announced the upcoming launch of Ericsson D-Fifteen, a new innovation and co-creation center at the company’s Santa Clara office, the vendor said in a release.
The Swedish firm said that the new center will enable the company to bring multiple core capabilities together under one roof. D-Fifteen, it said, combines Ericsson’s collaborative spirit with leading technologies to provide a high-powered platform for building new solutions, driven by co-creation and innovative partnerships.
The facility is under construction and will open in the summer of 2019.
Margaret Herndon, head of marketing and communications for Ericsson North America, said that D-Fifteen “will be a place for experimentation and collaboration, a showcase for the promising technologies that 5G will empower. This facility will bring together the brightest minds in Ericsson and, working with our partners, we’ll tap into the fast-moving, boundary-breaking spirit of Silicon Valley to bring about the next evolution in mobile networks. We want our partners to dare, design and deliver all in one world-class facility.”
Ericsson said that customers, partners and the Silicon Valley ecosystem community will be invited to collaborate around how their products and services will be affected by 5G technologies and get a firsthand look at the latest Ericsson innovations within core, edge computing, AI and cloud.
The center will bring together key areas of Ericsson’s technology innovators into one location. The first of those include:
-D-15 IoT Studio: A testing ground, where Ericsson engineers will test connected technologies.
-D-15 Labs: A 5G testbed where service providers and partners will be able to test the multi-layered networks that are at the heart of the 5G experience and enable technologies like self-driving cars and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
In February, Ericsson opened a new training center in Lewisville, Texas, becoming the largest U.S. facility for the Swedish vendor. The goal of that new facility is to train more technicians, tower climbers and specialists in the skills necessary to deploy 5G technologies in the U.S.
The Lewisville Center of Excellence, which is just over than 26,000 square feet, will provide field services training and support for Ericsson employees and partners, the vendor said; trainees will learn the skills needed to support Ericsson’s customers, as well as to roll out and maintain the systems that will bring 5G to the U.S. and Canada. Those include operator-specific courses taught by industry experts on topics from site installation to integration; radior base station installation, tower and rooftop installation; microwave alignment; deployment and network integration for 3G, 4G and 5G technologies; and virtual site support, according to Ericsson.
