The University of Surrey celebrated the opening of its 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at its Guildford, UK campus, with support from its partners, including Huawei, EE, Telefonica, Samsung, Vodafone and more.
Headed by Rahim Tafazolli, professor and director of the 5GIC, the center represents the culmination of three years of preparation. According to V3.co.uk, Tafazolli explained at the opening of the 5GIC that it will be fundamental in developing 5G technologies.
"This center is the first of its kind and will help us focus our efforts on 5G technologies and the impact they will have on the connected world," he said.
The 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) houses more than 170 researchers. (Source: University of Surrey)
At the opening ceremony, Huawei streamed an ultra-high definition 4K video and showcased a range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications over a 5G air interface via the test site it helped install on the university's campus. The 4K video was streamed to a mobile device over an enhanced outdoor mobile network that was jointly developed by Huawei and 5GIC.
According to Huawei, a new 5G radio network architecture called Radio Computing Architecture (RCA) was used in the test, enabling network slicing to be applied. Such slicing allows the same resource pool to be sliced in order to accommodate various 5G applications, such as self-driving vehicles, remote healthcare, smart city services and ultra-HD video streaming, Huawei says.
The 5GIC has set ambitious goals for its research, such as making 5G 50 times faster than 4G, and its capacity per square meter 1,000 times that of 4G, which will be key for M2M and IoT systems, according to V3. The 5GIC houses more than 170 researchers and was funded with a budget of more than $78 million, including funds from the Higher Education Funding Council for England and from the firms involved in the center.
"Connectivity of devices to the Internet will be as important as communications between people, and there are numerous industries that need to be modernized with wireless technologies in areas like cars, homes, future factories and health services," Tafazolli said.
The center already was operational before the official opening, and V3 reported earlier this year how the center had achieved a 1 Tbps speed test in lab conditions, with plans to carry out a real-world test next year.
Other partners in 5GIC include TEOCO Corporation, Cobham Wireless, Enterprise M3, Rohde & Schwarz, Imagination Technologies, Ascom, Anite and MYCOM OSI.
For more:
- see this v3.co.uk article
- see this Mobile News article
- see this University of Surrey release
- see this Huawei release
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