U.K. telco BT and French operator Orange are also part of the 5G PaaS initiative
Nokia Bell Labs announced it will lead a consortium of industry vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and European academic institutions to develop the next generation platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS) for the 5G era.
Finnish vendor Nokia said the consortium is part of the 5G-PPP, launched in 2014 as an initiative between the European Union (EU) and telecom concerns.
Nokia said that an ideal, cloud-native platform must facilitate building, shipping and running virtual network function (VNF) applications with “telco-grade” quality in terms of latency, reliability and capacity, thereby delivering the still-developing specifications of next-gen network technology.
The platform must also combine all sorts of third-party applications with those VNF, thereby creating more versatile and powerful cloud objects breaking silos between connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors, etc.) and computing (machine learning, big data, video applications).
With the NGPaaS, the consortium’s goal is to realize the vision of adopting the PaaS model to support cloud-native 5G systems.
“The consortium’s ambition for developing a next generation PaaS is to enable developers to collaborate within the 5G ecosystem in order to ignite new businesses; thereby increasing market scale and improving market economics,” Bessem Sayadi, consortium project leader and research manager for Nokia Bell Labs, said.
Members of the consortium include Nokia Bell Labs France, Nokia, Atos, BT, Orange, Virtual Open Systems, Vertical M2M, B-COM, ONAPP, the University of Milano-Bicocca, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet and IMEC.
Italy selects operators for 5G trials
Italy’s Ministry of Economic Development has selected companies to carry out pre-commercial trials of 5G technology using spectrum in the 3.6GHz-3.8GHz range in five cities.
Vodafone Italia was selected to carry out the tests in Milan, Wind and Open Fiber were selected for Prato and L’Aquila, and Telecom Italia (TI), Fastweb and Huawei will run the trials in Bari and Matera.
The process forms part of the Italian government’s efforts to implement the EU’s 5G-related action plan for 2020, which includes identifying at least one city for testing by 2018 and having a network in place by 2020.
