Welcome

BUILDING ON THE SUCCESS of the 5G Testbeds and Trials programme, the new Telecom Infrastructure Network is an important new approach for the UK. But it has come at a time of great change. When Testbeds and Trials was ramping up we were, even if we didn’t know it at the time, in a period of comparative stability. Today we face the opportunities and challenges of being post-Brexit and post pandemic, the uncertainty of rising costs of capital and resources, and the reality of conflict in Europe. Various parliamentary reports have concluded that the nation cannot be reliant on just Nokia and Ericsson. While the 5G Testbeds and Trials enjoyed the opportunities of this previous period, the Open Networks Research and Development Fund is born into a time of pragmatism.

To meet these challenges, we are in a second phase with a new management team, new stuff launched, 5G testbeds and trials put to bed, and the Future Networks programmes awake and getting going. Where we are going is laid out in the UK Open Networks R&D Fund Prospectus

“Accelerating the pace of telecoms innovation”, we have the Future open network Challenge, the Korea competition.

I’m delighted that the projects FRANC, SONIC and NeutroRAN are already collaborating. They have identified the need to be efficient, pragmatic and dedicated. Only if we can demonstrate real commercialism for what we are doing can we look back in three years and see the Open Networks Research and Development Fund as a success. We’ll need products, IP and revenue streams. We’ll need to demonstrate that what we’ve developed is important for the country. And we need to do it in the allotted timescale.

Part of the opportunity here, and a lesson learnt in Testbeds and Trials, is that we are no longer tied to 5G. That question of “why do you need 5G to do this” has gone away. We are now looking for the right technology to solve any given problem. This can be 4G, WiFi, LoRa, Satellite, Fixed, and of course 5G or whatever is suitable. Delivering an appropriate, resilient supply chain with secure technology is a matter of national security.

We are building a UK ecosystem, so the project’s first port of call with suppliers needs to be as close to home as possible. There is nowhere closer than the other projects in the FRANC programme. One of the things we learnt from Testbeds and

Trials was that the organisations that worked well both together and with each other became more than the sum of their parts.

Key to this was UK5G and for the future it will be UKTIN. This is the organisation that is taking over from UK5G. It comprises Cambridge Wireless, Digital Catapult, the University of Bristol and West Midlands 5G. All of which have been heavily involved in UK5G. So I expect the transition to be smooth. When looking for help your first port of call should be UKTIN.

Fortunately, we go into this period of extreme uncertainty with an army of people who’ve been through the 5G testbeds and trials. They are skilled and knowledgeable in the implementation of the technology. We are ready to build..

Keith Bullock Future Networks Programmes Programme Director DCMS

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Head of UK5G Robert Driver

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21 Satelittes

Smart Junctions

No one likes waiting at traffic lights, least of all former Minister Matt Warman

Faces Of Franc

Meet the people rising to the supply chain diversity challenge, as they really get motoring with their projects.

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Lessons Learned

Space is big. really big, and it’s just becoming relevant to cellular mobile. Vodafone and AST, Elon Musk and T-Mobile are working on direct to space cellular networks, while British company Bullitt anounces a world first. 40

Kids With Chromebooks

Liverpool 5G as built Europe’s largest 5G Standalone private network. It was designed to support the NHS with health, and particularly social care. But when the pandemic struck it was repurposed to support children learning from home. Jaine Pickering investigates.

The Testbeds and Trials have pioneered many aspects of 5G technology, often first of their kind use cases and working with new suppliers. DCMS and UK5G have worked to share the knowledge and build the ecosystem.

Swift

Smart Wireless Innovation Facility, or SWIFt is a 5G equipped incubator at the Nottingham Trent University Clifton campus. It has been designed as a living lab for researchers, businesses and policymakers demonstrate who the latest technology can be deployed and used.

UK5G INNOVATION BRIEFING IS PUBLISHED BY CW JP ON BEHALF OF UK5G, THE NATIONAL INNOVATION NETWORK FOR 5G . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ARTICLES MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM CWJP. OPINIONS, COMMENTSAND VIEWS INCLUDED IN THE JOURNAL ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF UK5G

IAN LEVY

Protecting the nation against cyber attacks is the role of The National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ. Technical Director Ian Levy explains the balancing of threats from a limited supply chain against the increased vulnerability of open architectures.

DIVERSITY MEANS DIFFERENT things to different people. In the mainstream it’s about having people of different races, backgrounds and cultures working together.

To radio engineers it’s a property of antennas placed less than a wavelength apart to interfere with one another and so increase their range.

For some Diversity is the Britain’s Got Talent dance troupe that pipped Susan Boyle in the 2009 final.

And to those concerned about the lack of choice when buying mobile equipment and services it’s aboutfinding alternatives to the main global players, namely, in the UK, Nokia and Ericsson.

It’s the third model of diversity – supply chain diversity – that has been exercising the British mobile industry.The problem is that there is not enough competition in the mobile industry. Thirty years ago there was plenty of choice: Siemens, Motorola, Alcatel, Marconi, and more. There were perhaps a dozen vendors who would sell you a 2G network.

The mobile industry has grown like crazy. In his book The 5G Myth, Professor William Webb gives a figure of $20 a month as the amount spent per person across the world. Given that there are more than six billion mobile phone accounts that’s $120 billion dollars a month coming into the industry.

So where did it all go wrong? Why did this fabulously wealthy industry find itself in a position where the people who made the equipment couldn’t make money? Strangely for such a big question there is a one-word answer: consolidation.

WHO’S WHO OF SMALL CELLS

Mobile networks used to be something only large multinational corporations could build. Now the option is open to compaines, campuses and communites. Simon Fletcher and Caroline Gabriel look at the questions you should ask when buying a small cell and we list the companies who can supply the apparatus.

Over the past two decades, the major mobile networks have bought one another. Fewer bigger network customers was bad for supply chain diversity: as the significantly more powerful customers used their position to grind down margin.

Vendors found themselves looking at the prospect of either taking a job worth hundreds of millions of dollars and making next to nothing on it or seeing the work go to a rival.

This led to an industry death spiral. Only Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei survived. Many vendors looked at the huge investment necessary to move from 3G to 4G and decided it wasn’t worth spending the money on a loss-making business.

That’s where we are today, but not where we will be tomorrow. Two things are changing. The first is the government-led programmes to build a supply chain, but just as important is the future of those providing the coverage. In a model of a network of networks, where there is a diversity of customers there is more opportunity for the new generation of suppliers to find customers looking to fill the gaps left by the major mobile networks.

Calling Time On Uk5g

All good things come to an end and UK5G was a very good thing. It showed that even with the best possible communications there is a value in meeting face to face and then while we couldn’t do that it found ways to create as much of the value possible through virtual meetings. The result was a community which worked together to learn about 5G. As UK5G concludes we look forward to UKTIN.

Just as diversity of race, gender and culture is important, just as the radio propagation of antennas using diversity is a tool in deployment and just as a diverse choice of suppliers is key, a diverse number of customers is important too.