The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is teeing up remote testing events as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to shifting meetings for standards work online and conducting more webinars.
ETSI said this week that it will hold its second Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything plugtest event in late July as a remote test event, in partnership with the 5G Automotive Association. ETSI said that it recently set up a remote lab for CV2X testing participants that utilizes ETSI’s Hub for Interoperability and Validation (HIVE). HIVE enables interconnection of participants’ labs around the world for access to both the remote sites and ETSI’s local infrastructure, and supports multi-party interoperability testing.
ETSI is also planning a remote plugtest for mission-critical services in late September to early October, which will be the latest in a series of MC-focused plugtests that have been held around the world — usually in-person, as with 2018 MC plugtest in Texas. The organization said that the upcoming MC plugtest will include railway-focused capabilities from 3GPP’s Release 15.
While ETSI has relied on both in-person and remote testing in the past, the availability of remote testing is particularly important right now, due to travel restrictions around the world.
“In these critical times, providing a remote solution for vendors to test their equipment is vital,” ETSI said.
ETSI said recently that it held more than 200 virtual meetings in March that were organized by ETSI and 3GPP technical groups. The organization is also increasing the number of webinars which it offers, with recent webinars on its reference architecture for augmented reality solutions; ETSI’s Experiential Networked Intelligence artificial intelligence architecture; and others.
ETSI reported in mid-April that its entire staff was working remotely, and that its IT department had been able to adapt and scale up its online services such as remote testing, virtual meetings and technical webinars. ETSI noted that its facilities at its Sophia Antipolis headquarters “benefit from several security back-ups which include real time hardware synchronization between the campus buildings; to ensure that if one site goes down the other site can take the load. In addition, every day, all of the ETSI production servers are synchronized to a remote data centre, thus backing-up all data stored on ETSI drives, web sites, and email servers.” As 3GPP has moved to conducting all meetings online, ETSI said that it has also freed up more than 20 GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar licenses to support its representatives to 3GPP to “keep 5G standardization on track.”
