UK5G. Issue 6

Innovation Briefing

ISSUE 6

DELIVERED BY

FOUR NATIONS LEAD IN 5G

UK COMPANIES BUILDING EQUIPMENT & SOFTWARE

#BeBetterConnected

MAPPING MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES BEING DEVELOPED AROUND THE UK

Nokia helps create some of the UK’s most critical networks We’re a trusted partner the UK can rely on

We create the technology that helps the world act together

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Welcome

GABRIEL BENOIS / UNSPLASH.COM. RETOUCHING STUART BERMAN.

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back in 2017, following the initial government commitment of £200m to set up the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme, the diversity and range of exciting trials and applications we would be exploring four years later. We set up the programme with a clear mission to build, foster and lead 5G for the UK. We wanted to help to build the business case, encourage thinking about possibilities beyond connectivity, foster the ecosystem and lead R&D to showcase UK companies, research centres and innovators.

The initial momentum, in July 2017, was a DCMS-funded, £16m test network consisting of collaboration between the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey, the University of Bristol and King’s College London. It created the world’s first end-toend 5G network, which continues to support other projects in the 5G programme.

Our approach began with an initial portfolio of projects that included applications such as precision farming with drones, increased manufacturing productivity through connected robotics, testing of network requirements for connected cars, and using the internet of things to improve healthcare in the home.

The varying geographies of our testbeds have been central to our trials. Connecting the salmon pens near Orkney is a different

challenge to those posed by the dense urban environments of Liverpool or Worcester.

Most of these challenges have been developed into later trials through the programme or into commercially viable businesses. In the birthplace of the industrial revolution, the West Midlands, we set up the UK’s first urban-wide 5G testbed: WM5G is a brilliant case study for what could be achieved in urban areas. The project estimates that £117.2m in savings could be achieved due to barrier-busting activities.

Our seven Rural Connected Communities projects are exploring the benefits of 5G to enhance tourism experiences, health and social care, public safety and agriculture, among other applications. These are developing different technical and commercial models.

Our two projects from the industrial competition were announced in line with the rural projects. 5G Enabled Manufacturing and 5G Encode, led by Ford Motor Company and Zeetta Networks respectively, tested the benefits of using 5G to boost productivity in the manufacturing sector. Interventions such as these will help to make the UK a global leader in the adoption and application of 5G through leadership in exploration and quantification of the benefits to real-world industrial use cases.

As we look to the future of the programme, we’re excited to see our 15 new 5G Create projects, from the Eden Project in

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Cornwall to AI-controlled traffic lights in Manchester, developing and flourishing.

The announcement of the 5G diversification strategy at the end of last year outlined the government’s clear, ambitious plan to grow our telecoms supply chain while ensuring it is resilient to future trends and threats. The strategy has three core strands: supporting incumbent suppliers; attracting new suppliers into the UK market; and accelerating the development and deployment of openinterface solutions. The government has committed an initial £250m to diversification projects.

We have already funded the SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre (SONIC) and NeutrORAN, a neutral host Open RAN testbed. Both will be delivered through the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme. These projects will grow the ecosystem for the testing, development and deployment of interoperable technologies in the UK. At the heart of that ecosystem will be the National Telecoms Lab, a state-ofthe-art R&D facility that will drive forward security, performance and resilience testing of new suppliers and technologies.

The Future RAN Competition (FRANC), launched earlier this month, is an open competition for DCMS and private-sector co-investment in Open RAN projects. The aim is to help to incentivise industry to create products and services that will help to unlock the full potential of Open RAN. Thank you all for being a part of this journey. The results are a testament to the hard work of the partners involved in the progression we’ve seen within sectors that adopt 5G into their industries.

Ian Smith

5G Testbeds and Trials Programme Director, DCMS

UK5G INNOVATION BRIEFING

Innovation Briefing

ISSUE 6

DELIVERED BY

THE BEST OF BRITISH: UK COMPANIES BUILDING 5G EQUIPMENT & SOFTWARE

FOUR NATIONS LEAD IN 5G

UK COMPANIES BUILDING EQUIPMENT & SOFTWARE

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UK5G.ORG

MAPPING MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES BEING DEVELOPED AROUND THE UK

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BEST OF BRITISH

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#BeBetterConnected

22/07/2021 21:01

U K5G Head of UK5G Robert Driver Head of Marketing Vicki DeBlasi Content Creation and Curation

Supply chain diversity is important for the robustness of UK networks and many of the key components can be bought from companies based in the UK. From radio hardware to core, security, antennas, networking and test equipment, much of it is developed in the British Isles.

NEWS

UK5G strengthens its team, the green working group gets going and the DCIA project plans to map streetlamps.

Crispin Moller Lauren Kelly

RADIO

UK5G Social Media Kate Cartwright Administration Kerry Preston-Ladd

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Contact : www.uk5g.org/about/contact/

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Fixed Wireless Access

Small Cell Deployment

DC M S Maeve Hickey, Mija Valdez

C WJ P Chairman Keith Young MBE Editor Simon Rockman simon@cwjp.co.uk Consulting Editor Andrew Orlowski

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5G WEEK

TECHNOLOGY MATRIX

Meeting in real life is back in town. The 5G Realised event was an opportunity to discuss progress on the roll-out of programmes.

Private core and 5G standalone are favourite development topics among the DCMS projects, but there is a lot more going on in the testbeds and trials and the other 5G programmes. We surveyed 30 projects and mapped their priorities across eight different broad categories that contained 70 detailed items.

andrew@cwjp.co.uk Creative Director Matthew Inman Sub-Editor Elisabeth Tacey Business Development Director Roger Hinkson roger@cwjp.co.uk Finance Director Delia Robinson Staff Writer Jonathan Rockman Photography Stuart Berman Special Projects Alex Young

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5G IOT 2025

LOCAL ACCESS LICENCES

We all know that 5G is about more than speed. We look at how low power and the internet of things will shape the future.

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Bands 3, 77 and 258 are available through a simple Ofcom process.

This new spectrum regime is a powerful tool for democratising access. But it’s still a new mechanism and is evolving through use.

Peter Gradwell looks at why not all band 77 is the same and why some devices claim to be compatible with it but are not.

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

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B E S T O F B R I TA I N S P E C I A L

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of a reputation for inventing stuff; difficult technology. From graphene to liquid-crystal displays to touch screens, the invention has been done here. Only the US has more Nobel prize winners than the UK. Traditionally, though, the technology is commercialised abroad, from China to California; the k’ching factor never happens here. Not so with 5G. In part of the 5G forest we had the “testbeds” part of the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme. Government funding paid for fundamental research at the universities of Bristol and Surrey and at King’s College London. We saw a fantastic understanding of how to make 5G tick, in particular in work on how to integrate software components from multiple vendors so that they all played nicely together. Not just in open systems, but looking at how different companies have interpreted the 3GPP standards, which underpin telecoms the world over. That work went on to feed the “trials” bit: the test track at Millbrook, rural coverage on Orkney and the Worcester Bosch factory, among others.

Normally this is where it would all start to go wrong. One would expect programmes to come to an end, a few people in the know to read some of the results and nothing much to change. The seeds planted by those taking part in the early projects would fail to take root and the work would not be exploited. Meanwhile, we’d see lessons learned seized upon elsewhere.

But a confluence of events led to a different turn of events. One was Ofcom liberalising radio spectrum. The local and shared access licence schemes are still taking baby steps and there is a lot to be tidied up, but they have given confidence to small and private networks. Then the big mobile network operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and to a lesser extent Three – launched 5G. We became the first country in Europe to have 5G on all networks.

So, with 5G flourishing, those seeds that had been sown by the early projects started to look very attractive to the major operators.

None of the operators took part in the first round of 5G Testbeds and Trials, yet all of them are working with the latest 5G Create round. The tiny teams are building into proper companies and those proper companies are building into an ecosystem. The MNOs that previously thought it too hard or risky to do anything other than buy a complete network from one vendor have started to embrace the work started in the testbeds. Vodafone has been particularly keen; it has been working with King’s since the college made the first 5G call, and now cooperates with Mavenir on Open RAN. Those seedlings are starting to take root in the most fertile ground: the UK 5G networks.

The rate of 5G deployment in the UK has slowed, particularly in the extension from the cities to the suburbs.

This is not good, as people split work between home and the office. Maybe mixing in smaller players is a distraction from highspeed roll-out, but the place we find ourselves in now, with a domestic ecosystem that can go from research to development to deployment, has put us in a strong position.

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SATELLITES

Backhaul in the sky is the solution for many remote deployments, and there has never been as much choice available as OneWeb and StarLink bring down the costs. Andrew Orlowski looks up.

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STUART BERMAN / TIM MARRS / MKDONS / SHUTTERSTOCK / UNSPLASH.COM

FOUR NATION 5G

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IMRAN SHAFI

Vicki DeBlasi examines how projects across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland will boost the economy post-pandemic.

Digital Britain has a new champion, fresh from No 10.

We meet the Director for Digital Infrastructure, who will lead Project Gigabit.

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OPEN RAN AND THE LAW

MAPPING THE WAY

Robert Pocknell looks at the changes to legislation that will be necessary to open up open networks.

E R E I N B L I G H T Y W E H AV E A B I T

Travel through 5G releases requires a roadmap to the tech.

Robert Driver navigates upcoming UK5G activity aimed at vertical industries.

WHILE EVERY CARE IS TAKEN IN COMPILING THE CONTENT, NEITHER UK5G NOR THE PUBLISHER ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITY FOR EFFECTS ARISING FROM THIS PUBLICATION. AVAILABLE ONLINE AT CWJPRESS.COM/UK5G

Simon Rockman

Editor, UK5G Innovation Briefing

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DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY INFRASTRUCTURE ACCELERATOR

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connectivity through the use of existing street furniture and buildings will be a key part of Project Gigabit, the government’s manifesto commitment to deliver fibre, or at least a fibre-like experience, to every home. Key to the fibre-like part is 5G. The new Digital Connectivity Infrastructure Accelerator, or DCIA, programme that has been launched by DCMS will tackle one of the key challenges to the use of publicly owned sites: many councils don’t know what they own or where precisely it’s located. When you are replacing bulbs, the precise location of a street light isn’t that important because the fitter can take the cherry picker to go and have a look. With radio planning, the way in which each lamp post aligns with nearby buildings is crucial.

The DCIA will work with local authorities, regional bodies, expert groups and network infrastructure providers to support the adoption of asset location, and potentially brokerage, platforms. This work will reduce the time needed to access sites and speed up deployment.

The current practice for identification of telecoms-enabled infrastructure locations is fragmented, done largely manually and lacking in uniform digital tools.

Nick Wiggin, Market Engagement Lead for the programme, told UK5G Innovation Briefing: “We’re working closely with a lot of the network operators, tower companies, small-cell providers, local authorities and regional authorities at the moment.

We’re in the process of coordinating some co-development groups to develop a technical specification that can be used widely by platform providers to ensure a similar approach is taken across the country, when utilising a digital asset mappping platform. We will look to mobilise some pilots later in the year to stress test this approach.

And we’re looking at effective channels to shar

best practice and our findings across the duration of the project.”

A central aim is to improve the ability of wireless infrastructure providers to access and acquire sites. The programme will gather data on market needs to inform the production of a technical specification standard for platforms. Initially the project team wants to spread the word, and demonstrate the benefits of greasing this value chain. Wiggin explains: “We want to remove friction at the local authority side, so they need to buy into the benefits. Equally we need to engage the facilitators, the people in the middle; they can provide the street furniture and access to it.”

The digital platform should provide UK MNOs, and others wanting to roll out private and neutral host networks, with a good way to accelerate their deployments. But Wiggin has wider ambitions: “We’re also looking to provide standardised contracts for the local authorities to work with providers across the UK. And we’re also trying to put in place specification standards through endorsement of publicly available specifications.” www.gov.uk/government/collections/digitalinfrastructure-connectivity-accelerator

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UK5G ADVISORY BOARD APPOINTS NEW MEMBERS Manufacturing, health and social care, transport and logistics, creative and media, and connectivity in places are now represented on the UK5G advisory board with ten new appointments.

The appointees are: Ann Williams from Liverpool City Council; Catherine Gull of Cellnex; Colin Evison from BAM Nuttall; Janette Hughes of DHI Scotland; Julian Randall from Unity Technologies; Martin Kelman of ATS Global; Matt Stagg from BT Sport; Muhammad Imran, University of Glasgow; Patrick Melia, Chief Executive of Sunderland City Council; and Paul Wilson from the Connected Places Catapult.

The move from members being telecommunications technologists to those who are implementing 5G in vertical markets reflects the maturity of the industry as we enter the final year of the testbeds and trials programme.

There is an emphasis on private and neutral host networks; Liverpool and Sunderland are both considering building networks that are independent of the major mobile network operators.

Liverpool’s Williams told us: “We are developing a private independent 5G network for health, social care and education use-cases. The covid pandemic shone a light on the impact that connectivity has on delivering remote health, social care, and education.

We will reduce digital poverty and health inequalities. Being a member of the advisory board provides the opportunity to share the real-life experience I have of delivering digital change at scale in the public sector with 5G.” www.uk5g.org/about/the-team

PLANET COMPUTERS WINNER OVER THE MOON

LAUNCH OF CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT WORKING GROUP

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the new working group that will focus on climate and the environment has been announced. The team is chaired by Adam Beaumont, whose company aql is working with five testbeds and trials projects. Beaumont is also a trustee of the Eden Project. Working with him are: Trevor Gill of DCMS, Becki Clark of Perform Green, Michael Burns from The Scotland 5G Centre, Vodafone ‘s Elisa Elschner, Simon Fletcher of Real Wireless, Mat Sears from BT, Digital Catapult’s David Pugh, Professor Timothy O’Farrell who is the Chair in Wireless Communication at Sheffield University, Parisa Cheraghi from Ofcom, Peter Curnow-Ford of Viatec Associates, Nic Stirk who heads up Pentiot, Andrew Melchior from Third Space and James Thomas of JET Engineering, which makes 5G-connected buoys to help monitor and protect marine environments. Thomas said: “I see 5G as a way to radically rethink how

Minister for Digital Infrastucture, Matt Warman (front right), and Ian Smith, 5GTT Programme Director (behind him), visit 5G Rural Dorset to learn about 5G buoys we provide connectivity; this rethink will allow us to ensure that we develop networks with environmental benefits in mind. With the learning from creating floating 5G in Dorset, I hope that we can further the environmental benefit use-cases.”

The working group was proposed at the UK5G Better Connected event earlier this year and attracted huge interest from participants.

This is reflected by the broad experience and seniority of the members of the team. The role group will help to inform DCMS, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Ofcom on the environmental implications of the roll-out and adoption of 5G in the UK and will act as an interface between UK5G and other environmental initiatives.

CONNECTED HOME REPORT FINDS PRICE IS MORE OF A CONCERN THAN PRIVACY TechUK’s fifth State of the Connected Home report looks at the connected and smart home-tech market. It charts what devices and services have been bought and analyses the barriers to adoption, consumer attitudes, sales drivers, and regulatory and policy issues. Because the report covers the lockdown periods it makes particularly interesting reading and gives recommendations for industry, government and regulators on how to remove barriers and increase adoption. A key insight is that interoperability has become a mainstream concern. It recommends that government and regulators produce a policy on product safety, cyber-security and net zero need. Government should promote smart-appliance adoption in the UK’s future product policy framework, because smart appliances save energy and offer safety advantages so they should be seen as routes to meeting environmental and product safety targets. The report notes that cost still remains the main barrier to adoption and briefly looks at the reasons for high prices that consumers are paying. There are also case studies from members and useful data on consumer perceptions of smart home tech.

You can find the report at: http://cwjp.co.uk/Connected

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Annabel Griffin is the winner of the Planet Computers Astro competition, which was run in the last issue of UK5G Innovation Briefing.

Griffin told us: “I am absolutely thrilled to hear the news I am the (very lucky) winner. For some time I have hankered after a mobile phone that transforms into a mini laptop.” The Astro is a unique British-designed 5G phone with a full qwerty sliding keyboard below the 6.5” touchscreen. It has wi-fi 6 and a 48-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a front camera for video-calling. There are slots for two nano SIMs and an additional eSIM. Memory is expandable through a microSD. The Astro is currently in the final stage of development, with production expected in September.

For more details see store.planetcom.co.uk/

VODAFONE AND MAVENIR TACKLE INDOOR COVERAGE WITH OPEN RAN

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problem for many businesses.

Vodafone and Mavenir are working on a small-cell solution based on Open RAN technology, to provide indoor 4G connectivity that can address the issue.

Designed for business customers that occupy medium to large office spaces, the plug-andplay small-cell equipment can ensure comprehensive mobile coverage in every corner of the office.

The software will be provided by Mavenir (Open vRAN), while Sercomm will provide the radio hardware. The design and flexibility of the small-cell solution means it will be interoperable with other Open-RAN-compliant vendor equipment.

The development of an indoor small-cell solution is the next stage of a long-standing relationship between Vodafone and Mavenir.

WHAT IF USING POWER MORE EFFICIENTLY COULD CONNECT THE ENTIRE WORLD? The step up from 4G to 5G is more like a sheer cliff of power demand.

But what if we could do more with less? ADI’s breakthroughs in power efficiency are taking a truly connected future from a pipedream, to an inevitability.

Analog Devices. Where what if becomes what is.

See What If: analog.com/WhatIf

Smarter, faster, stronger: Why the UK needs to grow coverage in the 5G race Ericsson’s Katherine Ainley takes a firm grasp of the UK’s 5G status and lays the path to faster deployment and UK success.

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ew Ericsson CEO of the UK and Ireland, Katherine Ainley, is relishing the task of helping the UK to win its race for global 5G leadership.

Having joined at the start of the year from BT, she’s become the driving force behind the UK turning the potential of 5G into a reality, working alongside all four of the UK’s mobile network operators to unlock the benefits of next-generation connectivity: “Getting the right infrastructure in place quickly for the full roll-out of 5G is really important for the country right now. What gets me superexcited is how people are going to use 5G in the future and how we can find ways to go faster with adoption, and do more with the technology and superior connectivity.”

The UK has been looking forward to 5G for many years, leading the way globally with early commercial launches and the UK Government has set some ambitious targets. But it’s no longer something to think about for just the future. With North America and Asia setting a ferocious pace on deployment, 5G is already becoming a

reality for many around the world and the demands for ubiquitous connectivity and innovation are growing rapidly.

Even the pandemic driving us from offices to homes didn’t dampen any demand for mobile data consumption.

Instead, we simply consumed more connectivity across mobile and Wi-Fi together. This is very much the new normal. “We all take connectivity so much more seriously”, says Ainley, “and we’ve all realised how important it is, be it for schooling, work or leisure; a Teams call, and staying in touch with our family. What we used to think was a little bit of a luxury has become absolutely crucial.”

Network data shows a marked increase in overall internet traffic – between 20 and 100 percent over pre-lockdown levels.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, healthcare, telemedicine, online gaming, shopping, and work accounted for most of the rise in traffic and time spent online, however Ericsson’s most recent ConsumerLab research shows there is still a long way to go to satisfy UK mobile subscribers. The research, representative of 1.3 billion global smartphone users (including 220 million

Ericsson and the 5G Testbeds and Trials With 143 commercial 5G agreements or contracts with unique operators, Ericsson’s global leadership in 5G is a well-known fact. And their commitment to unlocking the full potential of 5G in partnership with mobile operators also knows no bounds in the enterprise sector. The company is heavily involved in several projects within the UK’s 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme. Two of note are those that have been carried out at the Worcester Bosch factory in Worcester and Ford’s Dunton Technical Centre in Basildon, Essex. Findings from the Worcestershire 5G project as a whole show that up to 2% efficiency gains can be possible through the adoption of 5G technology in manufacturing, equivalent to £2.6bn at the UK level. The work at Ford, which includes the monitoring of the manufacture of electric motors, will be fundamental to the multi-billion-dollar restructuring of the business as it moves from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. The projects are a model of how Ericsson likes to work – through BT with the Bosch deployment and Vodafone at Ford. Those close working partnerships with all UK mobile operators to develop such cutting-edge 5G use cases in sectors like manufacturing, logistics and utilities are already establishing a high bar for industrial digitalisation, and there are substantial financial and economic rewards too.

Ericsson is continuously building on its relationships with major network operators and other partners to deploy the high-performance and agile private networks needed to guarantee the connectivity and security for data heavy applications that rely on real-time responsiveness, like remote control machinery and collision avoidance. Such an open approach typifies Ericsson’s belief that working together those within the 5G ecosystem can each play a vital role in building and expanding innovation across the UK.

We’re getting very close to people being able to really go out, touch, feel and use 5G but the UK still has a long way to go with getting coverage levels right.

5G users), reveals a significant gap between UK consumer perceptions and their excitement around 5G when compared to the telecoms industry. The research has found that in the UK, five million smartphone users could take up 5G in 2021 - globally, at least 300 million could. Those using 5G are more satisfied and are having better experiences than 4G users, but there remains a high level of confusion among consumers about 5G coverage and availability. Furthermore, 70% of existing global consumers expect better innovative services and applications that make use of 5G, however two-thirds of those use cases highly valued by consumers haven’t even been commercialized yet.

Operators must do more to convince users to switch and there are rewards if they succeed: In the UK, Net Promoter Score, a measure of brand loyalty for service providers was 24 among those using 5G, compared to just one among those using 4G. That translates into increased ARPU. UK consumers put high value on 5G plans bundled with digital

services and are willing to pay a further 7% more over and above the 10% premium they are willing to pay for 5G connectivity.

One of the drivers of increased use of 5G has been the arrival of the iPhone 12.

But Ainley sees that as only part of the puzzle: “Devices and applications will drive roll-out, but if you haven’t got the network, you don’t get the devices. There is a tipping point for people to go out, touch, feel and use 5G and I feel like we’re getting very close to that in the UK, but we’ve still got a long way to go to get the right levels of coverage across the country.”

While it is down to the operators to highlight the benefits of 5G, through deploying coverage and demonstrating use cases, it’s down to government to smooth the way for operators to do so. UK operators have long complained about the difficulty they have in working with local authorities. Three UK recently revealed that 50 percent of planning applications are turned down across the country and near enough 100 percent are rejected in London alone.

The UK is one of the slowest countries for granting planning consent. Revisions to the Electronic Communications Code in 2017 failed to go far enough, and while the recent launch of a consultation on changes to permitted development rights for communications infrastructure are welcome, they are more about really addressing the lack of wider area coverage than urban capacity. There is a sense of urgency required for the UK to take full advantage of 5G, especially now the recent spectrum auction has cleared the path for operators to press ahead.

But Government support and funding is one thing Ainley points to as potentially having the biggest impact on the UK’s future in the global 5G leadership race: “It is great to see the UK Government with such a clear ambition to put connectivity at the heart of its national agenda.

Changes to planning laws and things like 5G Testbeds and Trials, the Shared Rural Network and gigagbit connectivity targets are all very positive, but the schemes need to be executed speedily to ensure the UK can take full advantage of 5G.”

Taking full advantage of 5G is clearly what gets Ainley most excited but she adds a note of caution with the UK’s risk of becoming distracted at the most critical moment. The telecoms industry remains dazed by diversification and the future of open networking specifications, all despite Radio representing a very small part of overall telecoms infrastructure investment.

There is a real risk such short term distractions could see the UK repeat the errors made with a slow rollout of 4G and allow the US and China to establish a similar lead as they did with the global app economy. With the country’s long term economic competitiveness at stake, more complexity in the telecoms market could yet see the UK’s bid for global 5G leadership suffer from paralysis by analysis.

Such short-termism feels like a distraction the UK can ill afford. Ainley’s recommendation is to keep the focus resolutely targeted towards unlocking the immediate advantages of 5G and helping operators to speed up roll-out: “More uncertainty and mandated technology are the last thing the UK needs right now. The focus should be on giving operators every chance of success in immediate 5G deployments. That means regulation being technology neutral and allowing market forces and demand to flourish freely. We need to give UK operators the choice to make their own network architecture decisions and avoid political distraction.

We must stay focused on the UK’s 5G roll-out journey right here, right now.”

A critical part of that journey is helping to unlock the economic and social benefits of 5G for the entire country. Pandemic recovery presents a unique opportunity to rebuild in a different way; helping to create a dynamic, fair and green economy that offers opportunities to drive digital transformation in new industries, reduce industrial emissions and connect remote areas. It is these impacts that Ainley seems most exuberant about: “In the UK, you see huge opportunities for 5G, way beyond what we have experienced with previous mobile generations. We’re already seeing industries take advantage of superior connectivity with early use cases showing some astounding productivity gains and results. It gets me really excited to see the impact 5G can have on all our lives and I’m really proud to be at the forefront of those developments with Ericsson.”

For more information about Ericsson in the UK and Ireland visit ericsson.co.uk

Join us in shaping 5G for the UK

Connecting organisations working on 5G activities in the UK.

Sharing 5G project information, including the DCMS funded Testbeds and Trials Programme1.

Promoting UK capability internationally.

Linking technology supply with market demand from industrial sectors.

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UK5G is a key partner in the UK Government’s aim to maximise 5G in the UK and is supported by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

UK5G is delivered by a consortium comprising:

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lead in mobile technology. Perhaps it’s the great British reserve, but humility has no place when we have so much to shout about. A quick look at the UK5G Suppliers Directory shows a good number of UK companies that are developing, designing and manufacturing 5G and other radio technologies in Albion. This is just a taster of the work that is going on – there is far more that is unrecognised and falls below the radar. If you know of more, please get in touch with UK5G.

Illustration Tim Marrs

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The Power of Radio

Time was that the UK had major radio manufacturing through GEC, Plessey, Marconi and Racal. We lost the factories but we never lost the brains.

Now there is fresh impetus in a fast-growing generation of domestic innovators

Established players produce RAN technology for everything from small cells to macro deployments

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HE UK HAS A LONG

history in pioneering radio technology and this is reflected by the number of different UK companies in this space. Airspan, Blu Wireless, Cambridge Communication Systems – known as CCS – CableFree, cellXica, Filtronic and ip.access are established players that produce radio access network, or RAN, technology for everything from small cells to macro deployments for large areas, and the millimetre-wave technology that’s used to connect parts of the network together.

Airspan is headquartered in the US but also has a long established research and development, marketing and sales facility in Slough, Berkshire, which has recently been bolstered with plans announced in May for a 5G Innovation Lab. The new lab will focus on the development of Open RAN software, and

5G sub-6GHz and mmWave indoor and outdoor hardware for use in both public and private network use cases.

Airspan has a wide portfolio of 5G products, from sub-6GHz outdoor remote radio units that provide high throughput with 32×32 massive input, massive output, or MIMO, antenna arrays, to small, sub-6GHz indoor units capable of data-throughput speeds of up to 2.4Gbps. For even higher speeds it has a range of mmWave, open-standard, virtualisedRAN products which support up to 800MHz channel bandwidth.

The company has been closely involved in the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme, notably by leading the AutoAir project at UTAC CERAM’s Millbrook vehicle proving ground in Much of the development for international companies is done in the UK, either through dedicated facilities or collaboration with specialists.

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Bedford. This project enables the testing and demonstration of connected and autonomous vehicles and the accelerated development of 5G solutions that operate in sub-6GHz bands on a shared neutral host platform.

More recently, Airspan has been selected as a 5G RAN vendor in the DCMS-funded 5G Logistics and 5G Encode projects.

Also collaborating on the Millbrook project is Bristol-based Blu Wireless, which provides network equipment that operates in the 57-71GHz spectrum for high-speed transport, defence, 5G backhaul and smart-city applications. Blu Wireless claims to have solved the problems of range, mobility and interference management in mmWave systems to provide high throughput and range plus low latency for 5G gigabit networks.

Designed and built in the UK, its mmWave equipment is designed for a variety of demanding applications and it can deliver carrier-grade performance at ranges of up to

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3km. A point of differentiation is the ability to support high-speed transport applications at speeds of more than 180mph.

The company’s equipment is available and has been deployed and commercially proven in the rail industry. Rail operator FirstGroup, in partnership with Network Rail, DCMS, the Department of Transport and Blu Wireless, has rolled out 5G fixed, wireless, track-to-train infrastructure to serve FirstGroup’s South Western Railway, Great Western Railway, the TransPennine Express and Hull Trains.

From the silicon gorge of Bristol, we move to the silicon fen, where ip.access is based among the numerous radio-related start-ups that have been spun-off or have developed around the academic research base of Cambridge University. The company was acquired by Mavenir in November 2020, but the new ownership has re-affirmed its commitment to the UK with the establishment of a Centre of Innovation in Cambridge to focus on Mavenir’s open, virtualised, multiradio-access technology, or vMRAT. Although the development of vMRAT is focused specifically on the integration of 2G and 3G capabilities, the company’s ultimate goal is to develop an MRAT Open RAN system that is completely built on virtualised architecture, integrating all cellular stacks from 2G to 5G. Established in 2002, ip.access provides small cell and presence sensor systems. It develops 5G-ready small systems with the goal of unlocking the value of customers’ spectrum.

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L S O I N CA M B R I D G E I S C C S , which offers mmWave

multi-point to multi-point mesh solutions that operate in the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum. CCS initially worked on licensed mmWave bands when it was established ten years ago, before shifting its focus to the unlicensed band.

CCS welcomes the DCMS announcement that 50,000 rural Welsh homes and businesses may be eligible for broadband upgrades, thanks to a new collaboration between the UK and Welsh governments. The scheme will help

The AirSpan Airspeed 1900 supports the operators bands of N78 and N79, and the shared access licence frequency of N77, and is capable of up to 870Mbps. to cover the upfront costs of installing new gigabit-capable internet connections; the maximum funding available through each voucher has been doubled to £7,000 for small and medium-sized enterprises and £3,000 for residential premises. The company’s Metnet 60G radio units, which are manufactured in Ukraine, have been deployed to homes in rural areas. It was trialled in Monmouthshire, Wales, as part of an innovative DCMS-backed 5G pilot that was delivered last year by Broadway Partners.

The company first developed selforganising network, or SON, algorithms and deployed many networks in licensed spectrum.

Now, in 60GHz, it combines its experience and SON capability to utilise the wider channels to deliver higher throughputs to end-users. The company’s small form-factor radios are typically deployed on street furniture such as poles or on buildings to deliver reliable 5G connectivity. CCS’s Metnet SON has been developed to achieve advanced interference avoidance that uses diversity of time, frequency and space to continuously optimise spectral efficiency, traffic routing, performance and radio co-existence.

Demonstrating the variety and scope of the wireless sector in and around Cambridge, cellXica has a team of about 20 people who are supported by local and international partners to develop and

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manufacture the company’s offerings. At the centre of the portfolio is the SC5 softwaredefined radio platform, the first prototypes of which were built during 2011. With variants to the original design and enhancements to the underlying firmware and software infrastructure, SC5 applications now include base-station applications for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G networks, specialist equipment for direction finding, and a range of test equipment.

The company’s hardware and software has been supplied to the government-funded Chalke Mobile community project in the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire. Through the project, which utilises Ofcom’s new local access licences, the aim is to provide a 5G non-standalone configuration with a narrow 4G waveform to optimise coverage area. To access the service, residents will need to use SIM cards with international mobile subscriber identities. They will also be able to roam onto UK mobile operators’ networks.

In rival university city Oxford, Wireless Excellence, founded in 1996, designs and makes the CableFree range of products for high-performance wireless connectivity with capacities up to 10Gbps. CableFree products have been installed for customers in over 80 countries. The company has an ISO9001certified manufacturing facility and global network of distribution and reseller partners. It offers the CableFree Emerald range of 4G and 5G LTE products, which are aimed at privatenetwork deployments but also serve mobile and fixed rural broadband applications, and safe city, mobility, automation and security uses. The company has defined its upgrade path to 5G and beyond; support for the internet of things is already included. The range includes CableFree Emerald software-defined and Emerald 5G NR gNobeB 5G base stations, which support standalone and non-standalone connectivity.

CableFree also offers a range of 5G small cells, which include baseband and RF functions in single, compact units. The cells are available in outdoor and indoor versions to cover all FR1 frequency ranges for 5G, and they offer fibre-optic and copper RJ45 ports for direct connection to customer networks.

Company founder Stephen Patrick says that one of the challenges of 5G is to deliver wider bandwidths and dense modulation. Channels up to high-order QAM modulation are required.

These requirements together place great demands on radio design and

implementation, with advanced techniques utilised to deliver power, bandwidth and capacity.

The company has an extensive portfolio of products over different frequency bands and form factors from large macro to small cells.

Macro base stations feature multiple towermounted remote radio heads connected via fibre optics to a baseband unit, whereas small cells combine radio and baseband functions into a single compact unit, usually at much lower RF power levels.

Units are available in both standalone and non-standalone configurations as CableFree is looking to cater for both existing deployments with non standalone and greenfield private networks with standalone.

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radios for use in the unlicensed 5GHz band, enabling operators to deploy networks without spectrum licences. Away from the university cities, Filtronic has been developing and manufacturing RF, microwave and mmWave sub-systems since 1977. Headquartered in Sedgefield, County Durham, the company’s E-Band transceivers, of which it has now shipped more than 50,000 units, are targeted at the growing 5G backhaul market.

The company reckons that E-band spectrum in the mmWave frequency ranges of 71-76GHz and 81-86GHz offers original equipment manufacturers wide bandwidth.

MORE TO A RAN THAN CELLS Aside from RAN infrastructure, the UK is also home to many providers of other types of infrastructure hardware.

Next to the stars of RAN and core, these less glamorous productsinclude the makers of antennas, such as Amphenol Procom, low power transceivers, such as 1-VIA, and synchronisation tools, such as ADVA.

Equipment from CellXica, Blu Wireless and CableFree show there is a wide variety of hardware which is designed and manufactured in the UK Therefore, they will be able to provide 5G mobile network operators with high-capacity and high-data-rate backhaul, midhaul and front-haul, collectively known as XHaul. E-band has been identified as one of the critical wireless technologies required to address the demanding XHaul capacity requirements of 5G networks, and is now experiencing significant growth. Systems that contain Filtronic’s core E-band technology have been successfully demonstrated at data rates of up to 40Gbps.

AIM-listed Filtronic has recently won a Queen’s Award for export and has

Antennas play a fundamental role in enabling connections.

Amphenol Procom, which consists of the former Procom, Jaybeam and Skymasts brands, serves markets that include public safety, aviation, telecoms, hazardous environments, IoT, transportation and industry. The company, which has manufacturing capability in Denmark and the UK, has more than 7,000 products in its portfolio, mainly covering base-station, portable and mobile antennas, combiners, filters, and distributed antenna systems.

low-power transceivers.

Founder and Chief Executive Suhas Rattan told us that its core technology is based on high-performance data converters and digital signal processing. It targets the next generation of satellite, data centre, telecoms and automotive markets. The company employs both analogue and mixedsignal integrated-circuit designers and has combined experience of more than 100 years in silicon design of highspeed analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters and serialiser/ deserialisers.

Maidenhead-based 1-VIA develops high-speed and

Other companies with significant UK presence

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manufacturing capabilities in the US as well as the UK. “Over the past 18 months we have invested over £1 million in new equipment and have expanded our workforce in our hybrid microelectronics assembly facility in Sedgefield, County Durham,” said Filtronic Chief Executive Richard Gibbs. “This has enabled us to significantly increase capacity.”

The final member of the radio section is unexpected among UK companies – Nokia.

The Finnish network equipment vendor retains significant UK-based R&D capability, notably at the Nokia Bell Labs research facility in Cambridge. Nokia’s 5G portfolio covers radio access, core, transport, software, security and services, and the company’s 5G products and systems are deployed and in live operation in more than 60 networks globally.

supply essential tools and hardware.

ADVA is an optical networking specialist with products that support and enable the 5G marketplace, notably its network synchronisation product that it has sold to multiple operators for their 5G deployments, including BT. With an office in York, the company offers a portfolio of products that address 5G-related challenges.

These include XHaul solutions that merge backhaul and fronthaul networks. ADVA has built XHaul systems that help operators to manage the vast number of cells deployed at locations such as lamp posts.

The company’s edgecompute devices and network functions virtualisation platform is offered under the trade name Ensemble. This virtualised RAN technology enables coordination of the RAN from a centralised location so that simpler, cheaper radio units can be deployed.

To ensure that all elements and data in the network are accurately and reliably synchronised, ADVA sells a range of Oscilloquartz 5G timing devices, which meet stringent specifications so that phase and frequency are synchronised with nanosecond precision.

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Test and Measurement

Building a mobile network is an art almost as much as it is a science. Making it work in the optimum way requires an understanding of how it functions in real life, which must be gained through test and measurement.

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are established, network testing and monitoring is an ongoing task. The UK has a strong base of wellestablished companies that serve operators worldwide. These companies include Calnex Solutions, Spirent and Viavi Solutions, plus specialist providers such as Pico Technology.

Calnex Solutions is based in Linlithgow, Scotland. It has sites in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and California in the US, and sales teams in China and India. The company, founded in 2006, designs, produces and markets test instruments and solutions for network synchronisation and network emulation, which enable customers to validate the performance of critical infrastructure associated with telecoms networks.

Among Calnex’s customers are telecoms operators, network providers, systems suppliers, laboratories and network infrastructure testers. Among its 5G-related products, Paragon-neo is a platform to test the precision time protocols and synchronous ethernet that are required to show subnanosecond accuracy in 5G networks. Another offering, Calnex Sentinel, is a field solution for 3G/4G/5G mobile backhaul, E911/critical infrastructure, financial networks and power communications.

Viavi Solutions also has a base in Scotland and its UK headquarters in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. It provides testing and assurance systems to the telecoms industry.

Its TM500 5G test mobile family is a scalable test system that can be used to validate the network performance that end-users experience, across multiple cells and different radio access technologies. It offers open distributed unit and O-RAN radio unit testers.

With integrated data services, it is able to measure the complete performance of the 5G network, from RF through to the packet core.

The company offers its TeraVM virtualised application emulation and security performance system. It can be run in the lab, datacentre or cloud, to make sure that highly optimised 5G networks and services can be

delivered with minimal risk. The company also offers its NITRO GEO location intelligence systems. These use insights from subscribers to analyse, improve and optimise networks.

NITRO GEO captures, locates, stores and analyses data from all subscriber events. This subscriber-centric, app-aware intelligence creates an accurate understanding of the customer experience, to help monetise the network and deliver automated network optimisation.

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substantial global provider of automated test and assurance solutions for networks, cybersecurity, and positioning. In 5G, the company offers device and service testing, service assurance, network testing, cloud testing, service assurance and timing and synchronisation testing. Its corporate headquarters are in the UK but Spirent’s operational base is in San Jose, California, and the company has locations around the globe.

Its latest 5G-related move has been to launch a subscription-based, automated 5G core test platform, designed to accelerate Viavi Solutions’ TM500 simulates a high number of users accessing a cell to stress test the network. It runs 3G, 4G and 5G and helps automate testing.

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time-to-market and significantly reduce costs associated with 5G core validation. Called the Spirent Landslide 5GC automation package, the platform offers a library comprised of hundreds of test cases developed and managed by Spirent’s 5G experts.

“This is a true automation pipeline approach for service providers that need to accelerate their 5G deployment while managing tight budgets and resources,” said Doug Roberts, General Manager of Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance business. “The value extends well beyond initial deployment, helping validate network changes and, as standards evolve, eliminating the need to resource for ongoing test development.”

The University of Surrey’s 5G Innovation Centre is using Spirent Landslide to support its research to improve the user experience of services at its testbed of indoor and outdoor environments. With the technology, the centre’s team and industry partners can generate artificial traffic and simulate thousands of users accessing the network.

This enables the team to evaluate performance at various levels of signalling and user traffic.

Pico Technology was established in 1991 and soon became a leader in the field of oscilloscopes and data loggers. The company offers a range of active and passive network test probes for RF, microwave and gigabit networks.

Core Software

Dozens of elements make up a mobile core. Location, the features of your device, billing, radio technology, voice and video systems. And they all need to work together.

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UK-based providers of core software, which show that the UK’s 5G industry can provide technologies to support 5G network needs. These businesses include Attocore, Quortus, Metaswitch, Accelercomm, HPE and Weaver Labs. The field ranges from large, foreign-owned businesses with significant UK presence through smaller, UK-owned start-ups to established companies.

AttoCore is a Cambridge-headquartered business. It develops ultra-mobile core network software that can be deployed as a standalone network or interconnect with existing network services. Its main 5G-related product is Atto5GC, a 5G standalone core that provides enterprises with all the benefits of a 3GPP standard-compliant mobile core. Atto5GC can be used to provide a high level of control and enable firms to deploy additional services, such as IoT, that may not be implemented within the public network.

Private networks can be deployed using hybrid configurations of the Atto5GC, the company’s evolved packet core AttoEPC, and AttoEdge software with third-party EPCs. Atto5GC can be hosted entirely within the

cloud or within the enterprise and it can be distributed flexibly between cloud and enterprise locations. For instance, with AttoEdge in the company, either the AttoEPC or a third-party EPC can be in the cloud.

AttoCore is one of a large group of businesses that have formed the 5G Logistics consortium, which is led by the West of England Combined Authority. The 5G Logistics project will develop 5G products and services to support operations at Bristol Port and the Gravity Smart Campus, which is between Bristol and Exeter. AttoCore will build its Atto5GC standalone core into two private networks that will be deployed at the sites.

Quortus, another provider of core software, develops, tests and validates all its software in Camberley, Surrey, with offices in the US and Japan. The company targets the private wireless-network market. It provides enterprise solutions through a network of systems integrators and partners and collaborates on the AutoAir project at Millbrook Proving Ground.

Established 12 years ago, the company’s background is in 4G, from which it makes most of its revenues. However, it now has commercial deployments of 5G and that is

It is the best time to innovate in Telecoms, and the UK the right place

MARIA LEMA

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where the company’s investment focus is directed. “5G is all everyone wants to talk about,” said NEIL DUNHAM, Vice-President of Sales at Quortus. “We’re working with a cartesting facility on common Industry 4.0 usecases and for the US Department of Defense.

In the UK, deployments are mainly around manufacturing.”

Dunham said that the ecosystem around 5G was still immature and progress was hampered by the limited number of 5G user devices that were available. Nevertheless, the work that Quortus had been doing in the mature 4G ecosystem could be replicated for 5G. “There is some quite heavy lifting to be done from the engineering and operations perspective and the market needs people to collaborate at the technology level,” he explained.

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remaining telecoms vendors, Metaswitch, was acquired by Microsoft last year. Established in 1981, the company has recently moved into new headquarters in Enfield, Middlesex.

Metaswitch has been a network equipment provider for many decades and counts large operators across the world as its customers.

Metaswitch’s Fusion core comprises a programmable 5G user plane function, core control plane functions, a portfolio of servicebased architecture elements and management components for network orchestration and automation. It can be deployed within private, public or hybrid compute clouds. It has been built for 4G/5G business networks that use citizens broadband radio service, unlicensed LTE or unlicensed new radio, and can be used within distributed hybrid compute clouds, such as Azure private edge zones.

Metaswitch’s 5G core network functions are designed for private enterprise 5G and LTE implementations. The company says the functions are lightweight and cloud native and require fewer compute resources than alternatives. The user plane function features Metaswitch’s packet processing engine and so enables high traffic throughput on constrained multi-access edge resources.

Southampton-based AccelerComm was

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founded as a result of Chief Technical Officer ROB MAUNDER’s idea to form a company based around his wireless communications PhD team while he was a professor at Southampton University. Its products include the Low Density Parity Check and Polar complete chain solutions for 5G New Radio.

The relatively new code base, selected by 3GPP for 5G-NR, is very complex, so AccelerComm has created its Polar architecture, which enables higher degrees of parallel processing than before. The company claims significant reduction in resource and memory usage while delivering good block error rate performance.

AccelerComm has been selected by the 5G Open Innovation Lab, which is a global applied innovation ecosystem for corporations, academia and government institutions, as part of the lab’s third batch of companies to participate in its Spring 2021 programme.

Weaver Labs, based in London, was established by a team that included MARIA LEMA and other core contributors to the delivery of the UK’s first 5G pre-standards compliant testbed at King’s College London.

Now it is focused on developing a concept to enable a marketplace of telecoms assets that is oriented as a network-as-a-service.

The company has developed Cell Stack, which is in essence a distributed orchestrator that plugs into the infrastructure and can be utilised by different participants. The aim is to decentralise access to coverage and make it discoverable.

The six-employee company is engaged in trials in which Cell Stack is enabling the pairing of different providers of RAN and core. This opens opportunities for IoT devices, and others, to discover networks to support applications and to maximise capacity utilisation. Business models for the concept ROB MAUNDER

ADVANCED SECURITY TECHNOLOGY Maintenance of security in wireless networks has always been essential, but in 5G the stakes are raised because of the consequences of security breaches for the wide range of applications which it enables.The standard has high levels of security built in and a number of companies work to implement the protocols the datndards define. Encryption is the preferred mechanism by

which 5G security will be maintained and Londonbased Crypta Labs has developed quantum random number generators to produce truly random numbers. These generate keys to encrypt data and communications. Pseudorandom numbers, which are the current standard for key generation, are generated using predetermined algorithms. Crypta’s quantum random numbers are generated using the naturally random properties of light, which means they cannot be predicted.

Crypta Labs has developed the world’s first quantumseeded, encrypted mobile phone. They call it QSecure.

are still to be discussed, but Weaver Labs expects its tool to help to create the revenue model for a new marketplace of telecoms assets.

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participating in the Smart Junctions 5G project, which uses a private 5G network to enhance the Vivacity Labs Smart Junction Project. This is a traffic signal optimisation system that is based on artificial intelligence and is currently being deployed in Manchester, where it has cut waiting times at traffic lights.

For the project, Weaver Labs has designed and deployed a cloud-native 5G private network with the governance, security and service layer components necessary for it to be integrated into existing 5G public networks. This solution addresses the core technical and commercial aspects of 5G, including interoperability between hardware and software, openness and diversity in the telecoms supply chain and integration of neutral host networks, and extension of public networks into private networks.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise may not be UK-owned but HPE’s Communications Technology Group (CTG) is led from the UK by seasoned telecoms veteran PHIL MOTTRAM. The group comprises more than MOTTRAM 5,000 professionals who globally serve more than 300 telco customers across 160 countries. CTG team members based in the UK

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It was developed with the Ministry of Defence and Oxford and Singapore universities and uses quantum random number generation on a mobile phone.

It therefore combines a secure mobile device casing with a fully secure encryption protocol,so that any mobile device can be quickly adapted to make fully encrypted communications for both security and defence.

The QSecure case attaches to a Samsung Galaxy S7, which transforms the smart phone into a quantum andom number generator.

The random number can be supplied to any security software or app installed on the smart phone.

include R&D professionals, technology consultants, integration and installation experts, and customer support service engineers.

Key products include the HPE 5G Core Stack, which is available as a pre-integrated software and hardware platform via HPE Greenlake. Telecoms operators can deploy the HPE 5G Core Stack on a pay-as-you-use basis, so they reduce their risk and upfront investment by aligning costs to the number of subscribers.

HPE recently announced availability of its Open RAN solution stack, which helps to enable commercial deployment of Open RAN at scale in 5G networks. The stack includes HPE’s orchestration and automation software and offers RAN-specific infrastructure blueprints.

The company also offers the HPE Edge Orchestrator, which enables operators to offer edge-computing services to customers via information technology infrastructure at the edge of networks or on the customer’s premises.

This can help operators to monetise the 5G network and telco cloud while bringing lower latency, increased security and enhanced enduser experiences to customers. The clients can also access edge applications via a self-service app catalogue for simple management and monitoring and they can deploy an app to an edge device with simple one-click operation.

Network Planning

Calculating where to put mobile cell sites is a vital first step in building a network.

There are a number of British companies that provide software to help with this.

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investment required to roll out 5G means that service providers are focused on bringing the technology first to areas in which they can maximise returns. At the same time, these early deployments must provide excellent customer experiences to ensure that users are attracted to and value the technology. So network planning must be prioritised to ensure complete coverage, stable performance and cost efficiency in roll-out and operation. The UK industry includes start-ups such as Wireless Coverage and CGA Simulation.

Choosing where to site 5G base stations and small cells to achieve optimum performance is a complex challenge, given that the Earth’s surface is not uniform and hills, trees and buildings can obstruct signals. 5G demands far more dense networks than previous cellular generations, so planning installation sites and ensuring that these sites can optimise performance and business opportunities is a

critical task. In addition, roll-outs must be planned carefully to minimise cost and maximise time to market, so that service providers can rapidly begin to make returns on their investments.

Wireless Coverage has developed WISDM, a new software system that has been built to plan 5G and smart-city networks. It is British designed and built, using computing that has been accelerated by graphics processing and artificial intelligence, and is several hundred thousand times faster and therefore more accurate than established products. Chief Executive DAVID BURNS explained that the idea had come about as a result of encountering network planning and design challenges in his fixed wireless access business.

“With WISDM, we took the line-of-sight idea and productised it,” he said. “We created a system that did 15 billion line-of-sight tests in a couple of hours and we realised we could make this faster. We can now do one billion line-ofsight tests per second.”

Burns has clear reasons for the system

Choosing where to site 5G base stations and small cells to achieve optimum performance is a complex challenge

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speed. “It enables you to think about things in real-time and with much more fine detail,” he added. “The fine detail is very important with 5G when you use very high frequency bands. If you want to improve access you need to sample every few centimetres, not every ten metres – the problem is squared so you need the power and that’s what we’ve got.”

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Airport headquarters, WISDM has built its own supercomputer resources because using graphics processing units in the cloud is too expensive. The company is currently working with several UK customers and has worked in Ireland. He cites use-cases such as using the highly granular data that WISDM provides to enable service providers to site antennas on the walls of houses rather than on roofs. This saves time and cost and is safer for workers who have to fix up the antennas.

Plans include launching in North America, where the fixed wireless access market is more substantial than in the UK. “There are other

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systems that can do what we do,” he acknowledged, “but we can do it 300,000 times faster.”

CGA Simulation is a Liverpool-based, virtual simulation and games development expert.

The region was hugely influential in the eightbit home computers boom of the 1980s, with many of the top selling games coming from Mersyside.

The craft of coding has continued in the area and CGA Simulation has applied its creative gaming knowledge and expertise to simulate cities and road networks to support autonomous vehicles.

Simulations include data provided by infrared, lidar and radar sensors used by autonomous vehicles, accurate traffic flow models interacting with a 3D city, and optimised environments that can be viewed in virtual or mixed reality.

In 5G, the company is focused on planning tools to aid network roll-out. Work has included participation in the Liverpool 5G health and social care project. The company simulated and modelled the deprived area of Kensington in which the 5G small-cell network for this project is based.

Much of the infrastructure for the project is mounted on lamp posts, which in many cases also host CCTV cameras and so have fibre for backhaul as well as power. The use of more than 70 small cells means that a lot of work is required in both the radio planning and the coverage. The advantage that CGA Simulation has of working with a live 5G testbeds and trials project is that it can evaluate the accuracy of its plotting tools by doing street surveys to measure the signal strengths and then it can feed that data back into the tool to improve the results next time around.

Deployment is also an issue. CGA Simulation is working with other consortium members to include the creation of kits for installers that simplify the installation of small

cells and other 5G-related equipment.

The core of the concept is to make it easy for unskilled installers to site equipment accurately.

“Our aim was to create a planning tool that took the headache out of planning a 5G network,” explained JON WEATHERALL, Managing Director of CGA Simulation. “We’ve designed the tool to be accessible enough that teams from a non-technological background could pick it up and use it – with help from an explanatory film. Liverpool 5G’s network is a hybrid network that incorporates 5G small-cell, community LoRaWAN, and radio roaming

SUPPORT SOFTWARE Mobile networks don’t just rely on RAN equipment and core software – a multifaceted layer of support software is required to enable automation and performance and configuration capabilities, among others. The UK has a growing number of organisations in this space, which is characterised by being composed of relatively recent start-ups such as Aliniant and the slightly longer-established Zeetta Networks.

Aliniant focuses on automation of Open RAN architecture 4G and 5G networks. It produces performance and configuration management software that is focused on a set of use cases that optimise coverage and capacity while minimising sites. interference between sites They enable the prediction of faults that are likely to appear on sites, and provide a person-friendly way of dealing with this data. This means that engineers and other technical staff have a level playing field on which they can view data and communicate with each other.

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technology, so our planning tool is adaptable, interoperable and can be used by planning teams to facilitate 5G builds that deviate from the norm.”

The tool works by creating a 3D digital copy of the network build area by using data from local authority maps and from the Office for National Statistics to assess accurately where houses, roads, lamp-posts and street furniture are located and to replicate these in a visual display.

Users can analyse where 5G nodes should be placed to navigate around obstructions such as trees.

Zeetta Networks offers another example of how the UK’s further education sector is stimulating development of 5G networks. The company was a spin-off from the highperformance networks group of the University of Bristol. Its aim was to commercialise the group’s network virtualisation and slicing technology. Led by Chief Executive Vassilis Seferidis, Zeetta is a software company.

Zeetta’s network automation tools help its customers – business and managed service providers – to control, operate and monitor their networks so they can optimise the utilisation of their network infrastructure.

The suite monitors usage across the network, and the capabilities of technologies both the radio and the devices - used, from Wifi to 3G and 4G. Three products – Zeetta Visualise, Optimise and Automate – make up the portfolio.

Visualise provides a real view of the network, showing how it is currently configured and ways in which it can be reconfigured to achieve maximum efficiency.

Optimise offers a framework that makes creation and consumption of network services easy and efficient. Through service orchestration, Optimise delivers both control and data plane services automatically. Automate enables IT teams and

managed service providers to schedule configuration changes at specific times and dates. It helps to identify and remove expired or stranded services and configurations.

Zeetta is the lead company for the 5G ENCODE project, for which the company is responsible for getting the infrastructure working so that it is ready to support the use cases. Zeetta is providing an advanced network control capability. It has a proof-ofconcept multidomain orchestrator that will be developed as part of the project. In the early days, though, the network will be built using its single-domain, NETOS Rapide to manage the baseline, private LTE network.

The project managers expect to deliver improvements by reducing downtime during configuration and making best use of the machinery and components.

The second use case is around asset tracking.

Composites manufacture involves many time-critical steps and assets are often moved between sites and manufacturing locations.

When something like an Airbus wing – also manufactured in Bristol – is being made, it has to be moved between parts of the production facility, so the ability to hop between network technologies with network splicing is the key to being able to track these assets in real-time.

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U ILDI NG TH E ECO SYSTE M

is an important part of the work UK5G does. One of the ways it does this is through the UK5G Suppliers Directory.

This helps DCMS-funded consortia and British industry to source the suppliers and partners they need when they put their projects together.

Use of the directory is free, both for those seeking to list their products and services and for companies and organisations looking to buy. It is not limited to UK companies and registration is simple through an online form on the website.

UK5G recognised that when organisations were considering an application-orientated trial, they could be confused by the complexity of the technology supply chain. Also, many might not need to build a specific network testbed but instead

might be able to share access to an existing one.

Similarly, innovative manufacturers of the latest equipment find it hard to connect with those who are looking to create projects.

The UK5G Suppliers Directory addresses these challenges by providing a simple method for manufacturers, integrators and service providers to publicise their offers. The overall aim is to increase efficiency in the building of effective 5G deployments in the UK as well as to create a window through which the wider world can see the vibrancy of the UK supply chain.

Users can easily sort through the suppliers, which are listed in 44 categories. Contact information is provided with each profile and the whole directory can be downloaded.

The need for a sourcing guide is a reflection of how the mobile market is changing in both demand and supply. New spectrum rules have opened opportunities for the formation of new networks, while the adoption of open standards is causing a substantial growth in the number of providers of all sizes.

All companies are invited to register and use the information, but UK5G is particularly looking for suppliers that offer technology relevant to the creative and media industries, manufacturing and logistics, health and social care, and mobility and transport. If your company isn’t in the directory, application is easy and free.

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Creating an entry for your business in the UK5G Supplier directory is easy, there are quite a lot of questions but that’s what generates the value for those using it to source products and services. It also allows you the best scope for explaining what your company does. To keep this focus, it’s generally best to concentrate on your individual value-add. So if you are a RAN supplier which resells a core or a systems integrator which supplies entire networks you should not say you are a vendor for cores or cables.

To register please go to www.uk5g. org/5g-supplier-directory/create/ and the form will guide you through.

You will need good copies of the company logo. Logos are displayed at 100x88 and 238x170 on the site.

Quite a lot of the text is free-form.

This allows you to lay out what you offer, and there are sections which are tick boxes which will allow customers to do quick searches.

When entering the contact details, it’s better to give the name of an individual rather that simple info@ companyname.com. You can expect being in the directory to give a few, high quality leads and you don’t need to worry about pre-filtering.

Enterprise 5G: are you ready?

Yes, absolutely, says Lee Hargadon, Enterprise & Public Sector Head at Nokia UK & Ireland

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he excitement around 5G from the enterprise community has exceeded that of any previous tech innovation. Beyond the incredibly high speeds, pairing 5G with low-cost spectrum, cloud and data analytics reveals a raft of operational efficiency and safety gains.

Unsurprisingly, many enterprises have grasped this opportunity and are ready to take full advantage of private 5G. We have already seen deployments of private wireless networks across a diverse range of situations including mines, airports, ports, factories and hospitals. One example is a facility in Finland that deployed robots to reduce the distances walked by staff by more than 10 kilometres per week. There has also been real-time logistics management in a hospital to monitor and track supplies and equipment efficiently.

A connected production environment, powered by 5G, provides multiple benefits for business by ‘unwiring’ – allowing real-time interfacing between multiple mobile assets and analytics software.

Through our strategic partnership with Verizon, we are working with Associated British Ports to deploy private 5G at the Port of Southampton. This deployment addresses the problem of loss of onsite data communications as a result of poor WiFi connectivity, but also the advanced

capabilities of 5G – its reliability, throughput, security and ultra-low latency – enable the use of new technologies such as real-time analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning. This will support the enablement of new service advances including asset tracking, autonomous guided vehicles, workflow management, predictive maintenance and safety monitoring in the near future.

But what is next? I’ve seen the market develop as follows: Stimulation – multiple universities, research agencies, and industry-standard organisations have leapt in and driven early market adoption. In the UK, we have seen several programmes deliver incredible results for the increased understanding of

technology, the development of business cases and new partnerships. Innovation hubs have been integrated into many projects, driving competition and innovation whilst also knitting together an eco-system of like-minded players.

Connectivity concepts – we see visionaries stepping forward and investing in the technology. Some customers dive in, knowing the connectivity will provide a general benefit, but, more typically, they enable simple connectivity use-cases that drive quick returns. We are seeing many of these proofs of concept fast-forward into production environments now.

Connectivity-plus – we are clearly in this space now. Businesses are putting significant thought, planning and investment into methods that will boost their private networks to make quantum leaps in their operations through multiple use-cases, applications, devices, data analysis and interoperability of systems and data. They see their private networks as platforms, not connectivity media; connectivity just becomes another app.

These organisations, typically in process environments, ultimately see the value of connecting their ‘things’. This is what Industry 4.0 is all about.

So how will the market develop?

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In equipment and with related software providers. This is Nokia’s territory, as we have over 300 private wireless deployments.

Via communication service providers/ mobile network operators, which can provide spectrum, expertise around network management, enablement of the apps eco-system, and of course scale and access to customers.

Through the growing influence of neutral host networks, which make business cases fly.

Via specialist systems integrators – critical to quantifying the operational and technical benefits.

Through innovation hubs/ accelerators/academic research – this sector is alive and well and will continue to drive innovation.

Whilst Enterprise 5G is certainly in development, it’s maturing rapidly. Be assured that the eco-system of interested parties is robust and here for the longterm.

Contact Lee Hargadon, Enterprise & Public Sector Head at Nokia UK & Ireland (email lee.hargadon@nokia.com). More information can be found at nokia.com

Networks have become different from what they used to be.

Stefano Cantarelli looks at how software can make decisions to ensure the smoothest possible running of a mobile network in an automated way.

Multiple technologies, from 2G to 5G across many different frequencies, allow mobile networks to offer a multitude of services across each, but managing this has to be automated in order to make the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) even lower than today. It takes a predictive, automated system to ensure the quality-of-service that customers have come to expect.

Mavenir has a long history of pioneering the solutions that mobile network operators will need over the coming years, but the move to putting the machines in control is a fundamental change: looking at the world from a different perspective.

MNOs are evolving from providing just communications services to digital providers that offer a suite of services, such as broadband through fixed wireless access, content, and mobile apps. The ability to use 5G to run applications within the network makes a mobile operator akin to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

As both the network itself and the services offered to clients use new, cloud-based technologies, there is a business-critical need for closed-loop, intelligent, automated optimization of the digital and radio networks.

Mavenir has a portfolio of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics Solutions: • Analytics tools to help operators collate and visualize network performance, faults, resource utilizations, incidents and other insights, as well as engage in predictive network planning and optimization in near real-time to enable network automation.

• Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) consolidates and presents insights into network events, and serves as a source of analytics information to enable all core network nodes and Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) to perform tasks

more effectively.

• Non-Realtime and Near-Realtime RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) improve efficiency of radio network operations by using near real-time automation of the network’s configuration, optimization, and enforcement of dynamic policies at per user and service level granularity.

• Mavenir’s EdgeAI applications can be deployed close to where the data processing provides the low latency required to perform real-time analytics of application streams, including Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensor data, and provide advanced edge applications, such as Intelligent Video Analytics, for near real-time object detection.

The different solutions work together to harvest and analyse data from the behaviour of the network, predict immediate needs and decide upon pre-emptive actions.

All these systems are built as a suite to enable “Zero Touch Operations”, which is one of the most desirable capabilities for an operator of mobile networks or in general of telecommunications networks.

In the “Zero Touch Operations”, we have several tasks performed which can be categorised as: • Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) optimization: predict load of network functions and optimal resource utilisation, definition of optimal coverage and capacity, RAN sharing, traffic steering and mobility load balancing, and also massive MIMO beamforming optimization.

• Operation Automation: in this category we have network performance automation, smart paging, radio resource optimization, KPI optimization intelligent energy saving functions and many correlations and automatic actions as a result of alarm correlations and prioritization or suppression.

• Experience Improvement: let’s not forget about the user quality of service in

Mining data for better network and business performance is a skill that Mavenir has applied through processing billions of records a day across many of the biggest operators throughout the world

general, with network slicing optimization based on instant load and QoE, intelligent selection of user plane function for data segregation and many other AI-driven SLA management at UE/service level.

Mavenir’s vision for AI is Intelligence Everywhere. Intelligence is distributed and it is used for all the major telecom layers: Intelligent Networks, Intelligent Operations, Intelligent Services and last, but not least, Intelligent Business with Industry 4.0, Revenue Assurance, Customer Marketing Insights and more.

All Mavenir’s AI and AS products are cloud-native and standards-based with resource-efficient architecture, and they use advanced algorithms to address the real-world problems that network operators face. The tools allow networks to be more resource-efficient and so reduce both operational and capital expenditure through network-load prediction, dynamic scaling and near real-time optimization. Costs are further reduced by using a cloud-native, microservices architecture that runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and enables hyper-converged deployments and optimized resources usage.

Mavenir’s NWDAF and RIC applications take over where the legacy Self Optimizing Networks (SON) leave off, opening the door to a rich set of applications called rApps, such as MIMO optimization using R1 interface open-standard APIs. These apps tune network performance in a way that is more open and extensible than previous

XXXXXXXXXXX

Open, virtual and smart

options with SON. And what is most important is that it is by nature multivendor with open interfaces: no more forced multi-systems and vendor lock-ins, but multiple applications for One Network, Any Cloud, All Software!

Open for Business Mavenir has always been an industry

disruptor: first to market with innovative solutions such as VoLTE, RCS Business Messaging and Open vRAN. We firmly believe that breakthroughs happen when technology catches up with ideas. Innovators have a special DNA; they trust in themselves and in the future. At Mavenir, we value innovation, disruption and openness.

Why Mavenir for AI and Analytics

Open platform featuring standardscompliant interfaces and procedures

Vendor independent solution can work on any vendor’s RAN and Core

Comprehensive coverage for all telco domains and network functions

Hyper converged Edge stack with fully integrated and tested hardware and software

AI and Analytics deployments across Tier 1 operators globally

Mavenir offers real-time and near-real-time insights for some of the world’s largest

Tier 1 networks, processing billions of records per day Mavenir solutions allow Tier 1 operators to:

Optimize Network Performance

Enable Faster Reporting and Response

Achieve Cost Savings

Today’s communication service providers face the challenge of managing multiple networks and meeting consumer demands for new services while lowering overall costs. Expectations have changed – speed matters. What if all those needs could be met with a single network?

Mavenir is building the future of networks, focused on the vision of a single, software-based automated network that runs on any cloud. We see a future that is fully virtualized, supported by an open architecture which leverages web-scale economics. Meeting future demands requires transformation. It starts with building a software-based network that is not dependent on propriety hardware. Once the software has been disaggregated from the hardware, network functions – IMS, Core, RAN – can be virtualized.

Virtualization enables multiple applications to run across a shared pool of COTS hardware. Network functions can now be optimized and maintenanceautomated, reducing the reliance on human involvement and operational costs significantly. The new virtualized architecture also enables the movement of intelligence closer to the edge and takes advantage of AI and machine learning.

Operators must also handle the challenge of running multiple networks to support 2G/3G/4G, while pushing forward to 5G. Maintenance of multiple networks is complex and costly. Our vision is to have one network that can support multiple generations by running on a single RAN Baseband and using a converged core; one architecture that will support legacy networks (2G/3G/4G) and densify the coverage for 5G with aggregation of processing in the centralized and distributed units, which simplify the cell site and transform the total cost of ownership.

Having an open architecture and standards is also a key focus of our vision.

Open means choice for operators: the choice to build the best network using components from various vendors that are made to work together.

Finally, we want to see operators taking full advantage of cloud architectures.

Moving all solutions to containers that run as microservices allows the type of scaling and economics that is needed for future use cases that run on any cloud – private, hybrid or public.

Trust the Future. One network, any cloud, all software.

For more information email tushar.dhar@mavenir.com, or visit www.mavenir.com

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E T WO R K S O F L OW

earth orbit, or LEO, satellites are being launched to try to plug the gaps where consumers cannot get data. Radio transmissions are governed by the speed of light, and LEO networks are one seventeenth of the distance to conventional geostationary satellites, which beam broadcast signals. That gives them the potential to deliver data.

LEO satellites are now much cheaper than they were before. Reusable rockets and advances in radio boffinry – and the build-out and capabilities of mobile networks – mean that many more LEO satellites can be launched. More satellites will be launched in the next two years than ever have been.

The best known of these is the Starlink

venture by SpaceX, the company founded by Tesla Motors Chief Executive Elon Musk, which went live to UK consumers earlier this year.

About 1,800 Starlink units have been launched, but that’s only the start; 12,000 have been approved by the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, and Starlink has applied for more than 30,000 in total.

Another company, OneWeb, has now resumed its launch programme after an investment from the UK Government rescued it from bankruptcy. OneWeb has launched a third of its fleet and is just moving from partial to commercial coverage. Kuiper Systems, backed by Jeff Bezos, founder and former Chief Executive of Amazon, has permission from the FCC for 3,236 LEO satellites, but has yet to launch the first of these.

Rather than selling direct to consumers, OneWeb is targeting businesses, including

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mobile operators, and governments.

“While Starlink are targeting retail consumers, OneWeb are more focussed on business services, business connectivity, and on high reliability and low latency applications, like mission critical communications,” explains the Satellite Catapult’s Director of Ubiquitous Connectivity Kieran Arnold.

That’s also the path taken by Canada’s Telesat fleet. Telesat launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 and plans to install 288 in all.

Whatever the business model favoured by the constellation owner, it’s all about data: each satellite is designed to deliver fast internet. Rural users who until now have been deprived of data connections will be able to get them, and many more residents will be able to swap their slow, unreliable connections for fast, efficient links. Mobile networks

S AT E L L I T E S

Astronomers may hate them, but the new generation of small satellites going live currently will irrigate the UK’s data deserts by supplying fast internet across the country. Visible as a train of lights in the sky, each new system will provide affordable, high-performance broadband to regions where now it isn’t possible to get a signal. This widespread availability could prompt millions of people to reconsider where they live and work. But there’s a lot still to be done, finds Andrew Orlowski.

Photography SpaceX

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are central to this, as they will integrate the new infrastructure behind the scenes, without the consumer having to upgrade their phone.

(Iridium’s LEO network required a hefty, £2,000 phone that wouldn’t work on any other network).

The first users who will connect to the new generation of LEO satellites have already been sent their do-it-yourself kits (https://www. businessinsider.com/starlink-first-uk-residentset-up-spacex-internet-service20211?r=US&IR=T). The work to integrate 4G or 5G mobile networks with the new capabilities of the satellites is already taking place.

“What this is enabling – and none of the incumbents should see this as a threat – is 100 per cent coverage of fast internet for anyone who wants it,” says Adam Beaumont, founder and Chief Executive of aql, and a member of the UK5G Advisory Board.

“That’s the powerful statement; nobody’s been able to say that in the past. They’ve been fretting over 4G, or fibre not-spots, and the cost of commitment to fill that 3 per cent which is not served at all, which is a nigh-onimpossible task. Now there’s an operator who can.”

But until now, the economics didn’t add up.

“If you have just five users a week driving down a road, it’s not going to be worth that investment for any operator,” notes Howard Benn, Head of Standards and Industrial Affairs at Samsung Electronics.

This problem has bedevilled successive governments. Satellite changes this. It becomes feasible to think about the expense of a mobile base station, which requires power and backhaul to talk to other base stations on the network. Unlike expensive fibre or line-ofsight microwave, satellite doesn’t discriminate, and the large up-front capital expenditure is being handled by the satellite constellation owners.

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Starlink is substantially the most ambitious of the satellite networks

contribution to the government’s levelling-up agenda, narrowing the disparities between high-bandwidth cities and the towns outside.

In 2019, only about 40 per cent of rural users who took part in a poll had a broadband

MAKING SPACE

H E E C O N O M I C CA S E

for boosting the connectivity of a village, or a street that’s a mile from the market square, is also improved. Covid-19 lockdowns have prompted many to consider working outside metropolitan areas. But poor connectivity (rather than no connectivity at all) is frequently cited as one of the biggest factors that deters businesses from locating in or just outside Britain’s market towns. So the combination of LEO satellites and 5G promises to be a major

An app like Orbitrack shows overhead satellites.

There are a lot of them. It shows communication satellites for OneWeb, Amateur Radio Iridium, Orbcomm, Globalstar and Starlink as well as those in categories such as weather and navigation.

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connection that was faster than 2Mbps, way below the government’s minimum standard of 10Mbps download speed, and far below the 64Mbps national average download speed that Ofcom found in 2020. US analyst Craig Moffett estimated recently that with a typical 10:1 oversubscription ratio, Starlink could serve 700,000 users at its full speed of 100 Mbps.

Beaumont’s aql acquired 4G mobile operator BlueWave in 2014 and gained experience of building 4G in rural areas and of connecting ferries and ships. For this it began to integrate geostationary satellites into its service. On the Isle of Man today BlueWave is at the cutting edge, catching the signals of a major constellation and making them usable for everyday phone users.

“We now have first-hand experience of using satellites for 5G backhaul,” Beaumont

PROMISES REALISED

S AT E L L I T E S

Iridium, designed by Motorola in 1987 and launched in 1993, made many of the promises for revolutionising communications that we see from the new generation.

Still in use today as a voice service, it can be used in most locations on Earth.

says: “aql built out a ground station, which you can think of as a receiver and relay station for the signals from the satellite, and we got this to talk to our 5G network.”

This was not easy, he says: “The amount of engineering to make this happen is absolutely off the scale mind-boggling” but the physics challenges that LEO engineers must overcome are the same challenges that 5G engineers have been solving, for instance with phased array and beam-forming technology.

This means that 5G and satellite are perfect complementary technologies, says Beaumont.

“Combine the satellites with a very resilient last-mile delivery technology such as 5G and you’ve got a very promising new infrastructure.

Both LEO and 5G are two low-latency techs that accept step changes in throughput. Then combine that with wind or solar and you can start to deploy connectivity in very hard-toreach areas.”

The guinea pig for Beaumont’s BlueWave has been Candour Productions, a wildlife video production company based in Leeds (https:// uk5g.org/5g-updates/read-articles/born-bewild/). To make it more challenging, Candour sought to film in caves in Ribblesdale, North Yorkshire. And more challenging still, the company wanted to broadcast the results in real time. The Live and Wild project won the support of DCMS as part of its Testbeds and Trials programme.

BT has been using satellites for decades and is exploring what the new LEO satellites can offer. Andy Sutton, Principal Network Architect, told us the company gained insights through EE’s operation of the UK’s emergency services network (https://ee.co.uk/business/ large/esn/).

“We had to increase the overall availability of the network so we could achieve resilient transmission to strategic nodes, so they could switch over,” says Sutton. “What’s the most sensible and most viable way of achieving that? Having looked through the options we opted for satellite for resilience, plus the ability to deploy some specialist capabilities such as rapid response vehicles. And for times during upgrades, or a temporary outage, or vandalism during the early days of Covid.

“However, there’s a finite capacity and it covers a large geographical area. Capacity isn’t cheap on geostationary satellites. We use backhaul today - I’d suggest in the UK we’re ahead of the game.”

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H E L E O S AT E L L I T E S

create some new problems, says Sutton – for instance, they move very fast, increasing the Doppler effect – but their close proximity to Earth solves other traditional satellite problems, such as poor latency. There’s no need to use compression, for example. “From consumer trials of Starlink, the latency seems to be manageable,” he says.

Although it’s early days in the integration of 5G backhaul and satellite, both Sutton and Beaumont offer the opinion that availability of this technology would have made a significant difference in the early days of 2020’s coronavirus lockdown. For instance, Sutton explains that satellite kicks in when a base

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station is down, meaning that home workers would not have faced dropped connections, and lack of maintenance staff would have been less of a problem.

Security is another advantage of the new satellite infrastructure. The UK Space Agency’s Head of Telecommunications Strategy, Mike Rudd, explains: “An internet connection from the UK to Australia can travel via a number of routes, but not all of those are necessarily benign. Traffic is moving through regions where there’s no ability to inspect the cable, or to control any junctions on your circuit, so there’s a lot of scope and opportunity for bad practice. Satellite is inherently more secure.”

There are real-world, DCMS-supported examples of how this can work, such as in rural Dorset. The Satellite

LESS LAG Launching satellites has become much cheaper – thousands of small LEO satellites are being launched, much closer to Earth than previous satellites, all devoted to carrying internet data Being closer allows them to be competitive with home broadband or commercial backhaul The bandwidth should significantly impact on non-metropolitan broadband over the next decade Better broadband in town and country will permit businesses and consumers to think about where they want to live

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S AT E L L I T E S

ONE WEB A rival to Starlink, OneWeb has been part funded by the UK Government. It has launched over 200 of its planned 648 satellites. It has a Responsible Space initiative which undertakes to support clean de-orbit and disposal.

Catapult’s Arnold says it is “the only county without a motorway – the geography of the Jurassic coast, for example, is horrendous”.

This results in sparse rural communities living in the shadow of radio masts, as they do in many parts of the UK. The ideal place to put the masts would be out at sea, but that would be costly and impractical.

The 5G Rural Dorset programme, supported by the Satellite Applications Catapult, is exploring ways to use satellites to improve coverage, with benefits for offshore and onshore communities and organisations (https://5gruraldorset.org).

Better coverage means augmenting the reliability of networks so that they reach the five nines – 99.999 uptime – meaning fewer dropped calls for consumers. Coverage is so poor in Dorset, he says, that councils can’t use cashless machines in car parks, which means they have to employ car park attendants.

Maritime workers were among the first satellite users – the US predecessor to the global positioning system was opened up for ships to gain accurate positioning in 1967.

Today’s internet of things infrastructure means that small sensors, such as those that trace shipping containers, can be tracked more accurately by reliable and ubiquitous broadband over satellite.

“The large constellations give you that ability for persistent connectivity – particularly at northern latitudes, which you don’t get with a geostationary satellite,” explains Rudd.

Arnold says the question that remains is

how to get the link down to Earth. To answer that, the European Space Agency recently opened a 5G Hub at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. It’s hosting companies from the 5G ecosystem, satellite and terrestrial operators, and equipment providers, to test new services. It’s part of the strategic-programme-line 5G programme. One example at Harwell is an O2 initiative with the UK’s Space Agency, called the Darwin SatCom Lab, which is exploring industrial, IoT and automotive cases.

Another specific industrial IoT project will benefit rail users.

SODOR, the island satellites for digitisation of railways project, is an initiative inspired by the Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s railway series about Thomas the Tank Engine’s adventures on the eponymous island. It will use LEO satellites to improve integration and handovers and aims to address line-of-sight issues that occur with existing coverage. Reliable, low-bitrate links will support signalling, for example, and keep track of passengers and physical assets. In addition, since only a third of rail users are reported to be happy with their onboard wi-fi, a consortium that includes CGI, Icomera, 5G3i and Strathclyde University will address how the LEO constellations can provide dedicated track-side broadband.

What’s exciting and profound about the new constellations is how various industrial trends are affecting space businesses.

“The industry has gone from handbuilt equipment to commoditisation, and the supply chain has had to keep up,” explains the Space

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION SUPPLIED BY MARTIN COGGIN AND DOMINIC STROWBRIDGE

Making rural 5G work without fibre

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Agency’s Rudd. “Companies that produced 15 items a year now have to produce thousands.”

The new satellites aren’t exactly disposable – they’re packed with valuable rare-earth metals and they need more maintenance than geostationary satellites, as their low orbit means more friction and the need for more adjustments to maintain their position. That means a typical life span of seven years before their fuel depletes. But the low cost of space shots means the network can be upgraded constantly. And entrepreneurs are already looking at in-space refuelling, and are even considering manufacturing the satellites in space in the future.

Many of these UK companies are growing dramatically because of the new communications constellations. The UK space sector contributes some £15 billion to gross domestic product, and its members are specialists at inventing and manufacturing ingenious small solutions that are particularly useful to LEO constellations.

“The start-ups are much more bullish, more savvy and more aggressive at trying to get things through. We’ve got the funding, and it’s a nice group of entrepreneurs,” says Arnold.

In the future, direct satellite connections from your phone are likely to be incorporated into the 3GPP standards that the world’s cellular infrastructure uses. That would enable continuous coverage for not-spots or sites that have temporarily failed.

Benn of Samsung has a seat at those discussions. He thinks that “probably in two to three years we’ll have a standard capable of dealing better with a satellite signal. So it’ll be 2025-2026 before the standards emerge, and 2028 before the equipment arrives. But ultimately the promise is seamless roaming from terrestrial to satellite”.

Andrew Orlowski Journalist

Andrew Orlowski regularly writes for Sunday Telegraph Business, and is a former executive editor of The Register. He is a frequent commenter on the internet economy for the BBC and Sky News, and was invited to give oral evidence to the House of Lords Parliamentary Enquiry on Artificial Intelligence. Think of X, his new research network, consults on emerging technologies, policy and markets.

Quiet revolution in the air With the agility of a start-up and the pedigree of an industry veteran, Neos Networks has an extensive national fibre network that telcos can use to their advantage.

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t last, the liberalisation of UK telecoms infrastructure has prompted an influx of capital to make our networks fit for the twenty-first century. Neos Networks is one of the key companies that’s benefiting from the investments. It’s a spin out from energy company SSE Group – it was formerly known as SSE Enterprise Telecoms - and investment business Infracapital took a 50 per cent share two years ago for £380m.

The timing couldn’t be better. In a way that mirrors the microprocessor revolution of the 1980s, a quiet revolution is taking place in networking. It’s putting new capabilities within the reach of far more potential users, who have novel applications ready to use them. Meanwhile, established network customers are thinking about connecting their people and facilities in new ways. In short, seasoned clients will be able to do much more, while new customers can start to think about applying digitisation to their organisation. But that counts for nothing without the infrastructure.

Of all the recipients of new capital investment, Neos Networks is one of the few with a pure business focus. Its customer base represents both parts of the trend: Neos Networks offers a strong dark fibre product in its portfolio, alongside Ethernet and optical, and new customers are exploring networked applications that previously might have been carried out laboriously – such as collecting parking charges from meters – or not at all. These customers range from internet service providers and enterprises to local authorities and ‘altnets’ – or independent, alternative network providers. The altnet sector is burgeoning;

it has increased fourfold over a decade, according to the trade body, the Independent Networks Cooperative Association. All can now be served with high-capacity connectivity or dark fibre, which was previously unavailable to commercial customers.

“We have an aggressive capital expenditure deployment and our primary focus is on driving new infrastructure across the UK,” says Sarah Mills, Managing Director of Wholesale and Smart Infrastructure.

The network “Our priority in the first phase of our network expansion was urban focused, in major cities and towns. We installed our own racks and our own optical networking kit – and used that to aggregate connections from across our customer base in one place,” reflects Mills. With a net promoter score of +68, Neos Networks ranks more highly with its customers than do Apple or Audi.

Neos Networks began to expand its network in 2013 with an Ethernet investment programme called Project Edge. This involved lighting up its first fibre Points of Presence, or PoPs, initially in key business districts. That gave it a network of 234 PoPs. Being allowed into Openreach premises has been a big spur. It has now expanded to 477 PoPs and 90 data centres. Neos Networks will have unbundled 550 exchanges by the end of the year (465 were unbundled by midJuly), and will have a national network that covers more than 24,480km.

“We’ve developed a dark fibreconnected exchange network. It’s not running over a managed service that’s shared, in terms of capacity, like some of the networks of this nature are. We’re able to replicate and aggregate vast amounts

We can provide up to 400Gbps of backhaul in volume. That’s quite a unique selling point, with rivals struggling to facilitate 100Gbps across the UK in large quantities

of capacity seamlessly and connect it back to our data centre core. This allows us to be highly flexible to our customers needs without having the expense of upgrading our network frequently,” says Mills.

Many more locations need connections – and the post-pandemic migration from cities to towns and the countryside mean that more professional workers are clamouring for better service. That improved service doesn’t just appear overnight.

“We can provide up to 400Gbps of backhaul in volume. That’s quite a unique selling point in the world of backhaul at the moment, with rivals still struggling to facilitate 100Gbps across the UK in large quantities,” Mills adds.

The unbundling of BT exchanges is just one way in which Neos Networks has driven greater capacity to the market. But the company also offers a great example

it’s future proof,” says Rowe.

Lighting up dark fibre changes the economic model too, and not just for mobile operators.

“That’s where we come in, because we have a dark fibre product. The beauty of fibre is that, depending on what kit you have, you can light it to quite significant capacity,” says Mills.

Previously, choice of kit was driven by operational expenditure. Network customers bought a fixed-capacity connection, and were charged for every increase in additional capacity.

“That just doesn’t work in the 5G world. Everything has gone up a scale, and is so much more data driven,” says Rowe. Neos Networks is happy to provide a dedicated fibre and allow the customer to fill it as they wish.

The company provides SSE Group with its data and telephony infrastructure, ensuring constant power supply to residents across the UK. There is no room for error, which has led Neos Networks to attract many other customers looking for mission-critical support.

Future trends

of how the needs of the mobile industry can provide a catalyst for the wider networking economy. Mobile networks need more fibre in more places, and their needs are changing. These changes are driving new economic models. Three UK is utilising Neos Networks’ high capacity, wide-reaching fibre network to enable 5G and improve 4G services across the UK. It is taking advantage of Neos Networks core (data centre) and aggregation (exchange) networks to facilitate 5G across the country.

Mobile drives transformation 5G and fibre have prompted big changes in the way mobile operators carry data.

A partnership with mobile network operators Telefonica O2 and Three UK, which was announced in 2018, saw Neos Networks deploying fibre into Thames Water’s waste water network. “The

sewers as a conduit were largely untapped,” says Mills. Putting dense fibre through the sewers of London enabled thousands of businesses to benefit from the new capacity, creating what Mills describes as “the arterial routes” of London business.

Nigel Rowe, Neos Networks’ Director of MNO Network Transformation, says: “For 5G, networks need to be rearchitected to enable low latency – which means pushing everything out to the edge of the network to enable faster processing.” Most significant is the need to upgrade the networks’ backhaul – that’s the connection that carries the data traffic to and from each mast. This needs to be done for thousands of sites across each operator’s network.

“4G could cope with hundreds of megabits of backhaul, but 5G needs many gigabits, and ideally dark fibre so

5G will also drive the “densification” of networks: more connections in a given area. This means that the operators need more fibre to many more sites. For other commercial customers, fibre becomes viable to make connections in major buildings such as sports stadia, shopping centres or large offices. But further down the road, even lamp posts will need a fibre connection, as part of deeper tectonic shifts brought about by virtualising functions into the cloud.

“CloudRAN means some equipment will be grouped together in central locations and then distributed to smaller antennas, for example on lamp posts. But that lamp post still needs a fibre-backed connection,” Rowe explains.

Infrastructure suppliers need help with commercial wayleaves – permissions to install and maintain equipment on someone else’s premises. Getting these can be a lengthy and expensive process.

But the investment is a sign that the world takes the potential seriously – and business can do so much more once it’s networked.

Take a look at Neos Networks’ report, 5G for the enterprise, which investigates the current opportunities available thanks to 5G, and evaluates UK industry appetite for this next-generation technology.

Calming waves How to place multiple antennas near one another has challenged designers for decades, a problem exacerbated by using more frequencies in smaller devices. Dr Sampson Hu, CEO, Novocomms Limted explains its designs used by manufacturers worldwide.

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ntennas are everywhere but when they are brought together they prove to be unruly neighbours. And with the available real estate in devices shrinking with each product launch, that heated contest for physical space will only increase. Such is the problem that has challenged designers for years, but now Birmingham-based Novocomms has found a solution.

Any device designer will tell you that there are fundamental constraints on antenna size and placement. Antennas emit energy in the form of electromagnetic waves.

With one antenna, all is fine; however, the moment you lay down an antenna next to another, trouble starts in the form of mutual interference. One antenna can be swamped by the strong signal that comes from the next, making its receiver deaf to the weaker signal it should be processing.

Two antennas are bad enough, but when devices are enabled with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, and when up to four 4G MIMO antennas are required

for cellular communications, things become crowded. And that’s before the arrival of 5G into the neighbourhood.

Yet no longer. At Novocomms, engineers started with the assumption that designers building devices would want their antennas operating at the same time. And why not? It’s not unusual for a mobile device to be running apps that rely on GPS and Bluetooth while, say, streaming a video over Wi-Fi or the cellular network.

The only sensible solution is a new approach to antenna design. So the engineers at Novocomms design a suite of antennas together as a single system and then install that system into the device as a single cohesive unit. Chief Executive Officer Dr Sampson Hu explains how Novocomms takes this different approach.

Dr Hu says: ‘We accept that the antennas will be crowded together and that they will emit radiofrequency signals that can interfere with one another.”

To reduce interference, the

I am proud that our engineers have designed the world’s smallest 5G WWAN antennatuneable solution

company uses many standard techniques such as polarisation.

He continues: “We also make the antennas directional and point them away from one another. We do this by modifying the physical shape of the antenna in three dimensions.

“We also try to make it easier for antennas to ignore extraneous signals, using filters in a nontraditional way.”

Filters have to be considered, he says. “Normally, the filters used in antennas are bandpass filters. That is, they allow through only signals in the desired frequency band. The problem with digital bandpass filters is that they don’t get applied until after the analogue signal reaches the receiver and is converted to a digital stream.”

Dr Hu adds: “We know the frequencies at which the surrounding antennas are transmitting, so our analogue filters look for those specific frequencies and, in effect, short those signals to ground, dissipating their energy while passing the desired signals undisturbed to the receiver.

“With all this technology in use, we can place antennas physically close together.”

Dr Hu says one of the advantages Novocomms clients appreciate is the firm’s nimble approach.

“Along with a tight-knit group of engineers, most of whom have been awarded their PhDs in antenna design, we have a well-established supply chain that works with major manufacturers of smart watches and laptops, and we are experienced in quickly solving problems.”

To stay ahead of the competition, Dr Hu says, the company has had to invest heavily in research.

One of Novocomms’ patented designs dynamically retunes the low-band response while maintaining the stability of mid-high bands. These tuneable solutions can fully support 5G sub-6GHz frequency bands to meet a customer’s most challenging requirement within the limited antenna dimension.

“I am particularly proud that our engineers have designed the world’s smallest 5G WWAN antenna-tuneable solution for a major multinational,” he says.

For more information, email info@novocomms.com or telephone 0121 392 9388

PROJECT PRIORITIES

Testbeds & Trials Top Technology Topics With projects teams heads-down on delievery it is hard to get an overall view of the variety of work being done. Robert Driver dug into the details to build a map.

T

R AC K I N G T H E

technologies used by the DCMS funded projects gives a great overview of just how much work is being done. As a research project, the DCMS 5G Testbeds and Trials projects, along with some of the latest initiatives such as SONIC and West Midlands 5G, are looking at around 70 key technologies. We surveyed 30 of them to understand their technology priorities.

The project teams have told us which aspect of the 5G specification they are focusing on, the kind of spectrum licence they are using, aspects of their radio access network, whether their application is indoors or outdoors, technical subjects such as backhaul and aspects of the core they are deploying, and finally the general engineering or application focus of their project.

We asked everyone to prioritise against these categories by giving them marks out of 10. A mark of 9 or 10 indicated the highest priority.

30 KEY

8

PROJECTS

THESE WERE THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT PROJECTS SAID WERE THEIR HIGHEST PRIORITY, AND SHOW HOW MANY PROJECTS GAVE THE CATEGORY A MAXIMUM SCORE OF EITHER 9 OR 10 POINTS.

It’s no surprise that the fundamental 5G features of increased bandwith, low latency and high desnity of devices in a cell came out on top. We saw that 83% of all the projects were focused on eMBB and more than half the projects rated this a 10. We saw 70% were prioritising low latency and 57% mMTC. Interestingly nearly half, or 14, of the projects are focusing on the location services that are enabled through release 16, the 2020 update to the 5G specification, which is not yet widely implemented.

We have found that 17 projects are utilising licensed mobile spectrum; a higher proportion are using shared access licences (19 projects) and 16, local access licences. Twenty projects are making use of a test and development licence issued by Ofcom. Of course, some projects are using a variety of licences. The survey has found that 11 projects are using mmWave spectrum and three projects identify this as a high priority.

As this is a 5G project, it is to be expected that 90% of the projects are deploying standalone 5G New Radio. More projects are deploying small cells (25) than macro cells (18) - some projects are, of course, using both.

Across the 30 projects, there is a huge variety of use cases. Some, such as the seven rural projects, concentrate on outdoor installation, but 14 projects prioritise in-building applications. A recent Ericsson survey found that 70% of all operators worldwide had a fixed wireless access offering, and the DCMS projects are little different: 19 projects are deploying this type of access and this is the highest priority for four projects. Open RAN or multi-operator RAN is important for 19 projects and for six, this is the highest priority.

As one would expect, all projects are focusing on telecom innovation, with 20 projects covering neutral host applications - for

35 uk5g.org

six of the projects, this is their highest priority.

Other network applications range from orchestration to carrier aggregation. We see that 18 projects (60%) are using mobile network operator core networks. A higher proportion (24 projects, 80%) are using a private network core, and for 18 projects this is the highest priority.

The first six projects have proven to be a tremendous springboard for 5G innovation, and with so many more now active it’s wonderful to see the diversity of technologies being deployed. We are just at the start of the 5G journey, so mapping the way is an important exercise. The graphics and numbers over the next couple of pages should give you a feel for this lead.

PROJECTS SU RV EY ED 5G - AMC2 5G - Encode 5G Connected Forest 5G Edge-XR 5G Factory of the Future 5G Festival 5G Logistics 5G New Thinking 5G Ports - Port of Felixstowe 5G Rail Next 5G RuralDorset 5G Wales Unlocked 5G-CAL 5GEM UK Connected Cowes Eden Universe Green Planet AR Live and Wild: Filming with 5G Liverpool 5G Create Milton Keynes 5G

Mobile Access North Yorkshire Multi-Operator Neutral Host NEC NeutrORAN Project Vista Smart Junctions 5G SmartRan Open Network Innovation Centre (SONIC) West Mercia Rural 5G WM5G - 5prinG Application Accelerator WM5G - Health WM5G - Infrastructure Accelerator WM5G Manufacturing - AE Aerospace - “Glass Factory” WM5G Manufacturing - MTC WM5G Transport

THESE GRAPHICS ARE DRAWN FROM DATA PROVIDED BY 30 DCMS-SUPPORTED 5G PROJECTS

TOP

10

More projects are exploring applications outside, but some are doing both inside and outside

16

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES

OUTSIDE Private Network Core

5G New Radio SA

eMBB 17

18

MEC

IoT

14

14

14

Shared Access

AR/VR 12

13

Backhaul - 5G New fibre Radio NSA 12

12

Test/dev licence

14

11

INSIDE THESE WERE THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT PROJECTS SAID WERE THEIR HIGHEST PRIORITY, AND SHOW HOW MANY PROJECTS GAVE THE CATEGORY A MAXIMUM SCORE OF EITHER 9 OR 10 POINTS.

83

70

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%

%

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7

12

The majority of projects (90%) are using fibre for backhaul. Only 7 are using microwave mesh, and 12 microwave point to point.

9 projects (30%) are using satellite backhaul - and 3 have identified this as a high priority

17 projects (57%) identify eMBB as their highest priority

3

BAC K H AU L

mMTC

Microwave Point to Point

uRLLC

Microwave Mesh

83% of all the projects focus on enhanced mobile broadband [eMBB], 70% on low latency [uRLLC] and 57% on mMTC. Surprisingly 14 projects are focusing on the location services enabled through Rel.16.

eMBB

Fibre

5 G S P EC I F I C AT I O N

PROJECTS

SPECTRUM LICENCES Only half of the projects are utilising licensed mobile spectrum. A higher proportion are using a shared access licence (19 projects) and 16 a local licence. 20 projects are making use of a test & development licence issued

by Ofcom. Of course some projects are using a variety of licences.

16

24

While 23 projects are exploring network slicing, this is only a high priority for 4 projects. 12 projects are exploring local roaming, and this is a strong focus for 4.

60% of the projects are using mobile network operator core networks. A higher proportion (80%) are using a private network core, and for 18 projects this is the highest priority.

4

3 projects have identified .

OSS/BSS as a high priority

14

T&D Licence

Local Licence

Sharred Access

Licensed Mobile Spectrum

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4

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25

19 4

While 8 projects are exploring dynamic access spectrum, only 1 project is prioritising this [5G New Thinking]. 3 projects have identified mmWave spectrum as a high priority.

None of the projects are prioritising TV white space.

state that they are investigating Open RAN or MultiOperator RAN and for 6 of the projects this is the highest priority.

SA New Radio

Fixed Wireless Access Small Cell Deployment

90% of the projects are deploying standalone 5G new radio.

63% of the projects (19) are investigating fixed wireless access - for 4 of the projects this is the highest priority.

More projects are deploying small cells (83%) than are utilising macro cells (60%) - some projects are, of course, utilising both.

ENGINEERING FOCUS

There are a wide range of applications.

93% of the projects are focusing on 5G security, and for 9 this is the highest development priority.

28 9

IoT 24

17 5

PROJECTS

17 projects state that they are exploring artificial intelligence and for 5 this is a high priority.

T E L E C O M I N N O VAT I O N 6

INTERNET OF THINGS

In all, 24 projects are deploying 14 IoT or sensor arrays, and for 14 this is a high P R O J E C T S priority focus.

More than half of the projects are investigating cellular IoT deployments (NB-IoT or LTE-M) - for two projects this is a high priority. 3 projects are deploying LoRA sensors and 1 project is looking at Sigfox

8

PROJECTS

18

7

PROJECTS

21 projects have an IoT platform in their core - and for 8 projects this is a high priority.

18 projects are looking at asset tracking, and for 7 this is a high priority.

PROJECTS

As one would expect, all projects are focusing on telecom innovation. 20 projects cover neutral host applications (and for 6 of the projects, this is their highest priority).

r aggregation. orchestration to carrie from ge ran s tion lica app k Other networ 80% of the projects are looking at AR/VR applications and this is the highest priority for 12 projects, not all of them, of course, in the entertainment and media segments.

IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES 80%

24 12

E N T E R TA I N M E N T AND MEDIA A P P L I CAT I O N S

16

6

PROJECTS

16 projects are deploying entertainment and streaming platforms in their core (it is a high priority for 6 projects). Engineering applications in this sector range from FeMBMS enhanced video services for live events to audio over IP applications.

PROJECTS

I N D U S T R I A L A P P L I C AT I O N

16

3

PROJECTS

16 projects are looking at process control applications with 3 projects stating this is their highest priority; business models such as machine time as a service are being investigated in 1 project.

PONGO AND MATELOT

4

For 4 projects, predictive maintenance is of the highest priority.

10 projects state they are exploring vehicle automation, and in addition, realtime remote control and teleoperation applications are being investigated in specific projects.

PROJECTS

AU T O M AT I O N

Delivering full 5G coverage and capabilities – with low, mid and mmWave bands 7

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5 A recent study by Analysys Mason into 5G deployment considered total investments in mobile networks4for a 5G eMBB base-case coverage, together with the value created 3.8 by 5G in terms of the economic benefits produced across different types of use cases.

With the same baseline, we investigated the different types of use cases enabled by 5G 3 millimetre-wave (or mmWave) spectrum in the 26GHz band, primarily in conjunction with 3.5GHz and2other existing mobile spectrum, but also 26GHz cells, across 6.0standalone5.5 6.5 1.3 a wide range of scenarios for outdoor or indoor coverage. 1.1 1.0 3.8 1

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0 edition of • Low frequency (LF) 5G case – n article in an earlier mmWave study portsadditional Airports Smart factories Urban and FWA investment toStadiums extend The mmWave study involved three the UK5G InnovationIndustrial Briefing suburban locations low-frequency 5G to full geographical components of research and modelling: described a study conducted by coverage (assuming that a single • Primary research with fixed and mobile Analysys Mason for Ericsson Benefitnetwork CBR infrastructure would reachCost the final operators to discuss plans for and Qualcomm into the costs and benefits percentage of uncovered area in the 5G mmWave deployment of deploying 5G networks with full 5G UK1) • Secondary research on the latest status capabilities to address a range of urban, of 5G mmWave deployment • Full 5G case – incremental costs for rural, public sector and industrial use cases.

• Economic modelling of the costs and full 5G coverage using mid-/highbenefits associated with the 5G frequency bands.

Following on from that work, we were functionality enabled by 26GHz asked to conduct two further studies: deployment, using a 5G eMBB base • The first study assessed the cost and case, for selected use cases based on extent of 5G coverage provided by operator feedback. commercially led mobile broadband (MBB) deployments, plus the additional investment needed to deliver nearKey findings universal geographical coverage (using low-frequency spectrum in a single Geographical study rural network), and additional Our modelling suggests that commercially investment to extend 3.5GHz 5G driven mid-band (3.5GHz) spectrum coverage beyond a commercial deployment in the UK will reach nearly (base-case) footprint 70% of the population by 2025, with • The second study assessed the cost investment reaching nearly GBP15 billion and benefits of 5G mmWave, focusing across the four UK networks by 2025. This on use cases gathered from speaking equates to only 12% of the geographical to several operators (both fixed and area having mid-band coverage, but is mobile) in Europe and elsewhere. more expansive with 700MHz, reaching 95% of the UK in our base case. We also assume that 26GHz mmWave spectrum 5G geographical study will have been rolled out across outdoor, We defined three scenarios to model the and indoor, high-capacity locations. cost and extent of 5G coverage across 30 To bridge the connectivity gap from markets in Europe: 95% to closer to 100% geographical 5G • Base case – investment to provide . A >> 3.5GHz base-case coverage coverage in the LF 5G scenario, we population-led coverage of 5G Extra 3.5GHz roll-out (multiple networks) estimate that a further GBP85 million of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) . C >> – commercial public subsidy will cover estimated capex services by 2023, 2025 and thereafter, Extra 3.5GHz roll-out (single network) for a single, multi-use network using assuming 5G radio is rolled out to the – public subsidy 700MHz frequencies. This assumes that existing mobile sites in each market Not covered by 3.5GHz (i.e. no rail, road or agricultural area) the lowest-cost deployment option is a (with population coverage in each single infrastructure, to avoid additional market commensurate with existing Figure 1: Results of 5G coverage modelling [Source: Analysys Mason, 2021] costs resulting from duplication of sites in that market)

Cate

1 That is, filling in coverage gaps not addressed by the other scenarios. In the UK, the Shared Rural Network (SRN) plans to ensure 4G mobile coverage reaches 95% geographical coverage by 2025, and our base-case modelling assumed that 5G radio would be rolled out onto existing sites, including those sites in the SRN footprint. Hence the 5G low-band scenario considered the costs of covering the final 5% of the UK territory.

infrastructure. This requires co-operation between industry and policy makers to achieve a roll-out structure that will minimise duplication of network build.

We estimate that bridging the midband coverage gap could be achieved with a further GBP0.8 billion of investment, bringing geographical coverage using 3.5GHz spectrum to around 95% of the UK. The mid-band coverage gap investment assumes the same 5G infrastructure meets the different requirements of multiple 5G use cases via network slicing (e.g. road, rail, agriculture, industry, enterprise).

We estimate that the GBP0.8 billion requires a mix of additional commercial investment plus public subsidy. The resulting mid-band coverage under our full 5G capabilities scenario (95% of geography covered using mid-band spectrum) is shown in Figure 1 opposite.

mmWave study The mmWave study found that 26GHz spectrum can provide connectivity for mobile broadband users on public mobile networks, 5G fixed-wireless access (FWA) services into homes and offices, as well as a wide range of other consumer, enterprise and industrial uses. Interviews with operators indicated that they intend to use mmWave deployment in multiple localised outdoor and indoor environments (based on network loading and local market demand).

A wide variety of use cases were described (mobile broadband in highcapacity locations, 5G-based FWA, enterprise networks, smart factory and other industrial applications, connected vehicles, events and venue-specific coverage). The present value of UK-wide

benefits from 26GHz deployment is estimated to be EUR12.9 billion (GBP11.1 billion), compared to investment in 26GHz infrastructure totalling EUR5.3 billion (GBP4.6 billion) across multiple networks and deployments, as shown below.

The analysis is based on a 5G eMBB base case and considers a mix of architectures across the different use cases.2 It also assumes that for the eMBB (high-density urban and suburban locations) and FWA use cases, the total number of installations estimated are deployed over a period of five years, beginning in the year that 26GHz spectrum is expected to be assigned. For the remaining use cases, we assume that deployment begins one year after spectrum award.

Interviews highlighted that mmWave can be used to maximise capacity within mobile networks (since frequencies can be reused more intensively without cochannel interference occurring) as well as to allow for more flexibility to adapt time-division duplex (TDD) frame structures to address different uplink and downlink capacity requirements.

While the ecosystem is in its early days for 26GHz, this may change as further European markets proceed with 26GHz licensing during 2021. We note that the upper 1GHz of the 26GHz band (i.e.

26.5–27.5GHz) already has a welldeveloped ecosystem, since this range overlaps with the bottom 1GHz of the 28GHz band. The ecosystem is larger for 28GHz than 26GHz due to the earlier licensing of this band.

In conclusion, the study demonstrates the importance for European regulators to complete 5G licensing in all of the bands identified at an EU level.

Details of the sponsors of this article:

Analysys Mason Analysys Mason is the world’s leading management consultancy focused on TMT, a critical enabler of economic, environmental and social transformation.

We bring together unparalleled commercial and technical understanding to deliver bespoke consultancy on strategy, transaction support, transformation, regulation and policy, further strengthened by globally respected research.

Our clients value our advice which combines deep domain knowledge with global reach and local insight into markets to help them achieve meaningful business results.

We are committed to our clients, employees and communities – contributing to a world where technology delivers for all.

For more information visit www.analysysmason.com

Ericsson Ericsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity.

The company’s portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Business. It is designed to help our customers go digital, increase efficiency and find new revenue streams. Ericsson’s innovation investments have delivered the benefits of mobility and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world. Ericsson stock is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York. www.ericsson.com

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Cost-benefit ratio (CBR)

EUR billion

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FWA

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CBR

Qualcomm Qualcomm is a semiconductor and wireless telecommunications designer and manufacturer.

We were one of the pioneers of 3G and 4G, and now are leading the way to 5G. Qualcomm’s products are revolutionary within industries such as automotive IoT, healthcare, security, and more. Visit the link |to explore Qualcomm’s latest 5G inventions: www.qualcomm.com/products/5g

Figure 2: Present value of costs and benefits of mmWave deployment (EUR billion) [Source: Analysys Mason, 2021]

Cate 2

A 3.5GHz macro site upgraded with 26GHz, a new 26GHz dedicated site (possibly sharing 3.5GHz from a nearby macro site) and a 26GHz small cell.

5G Realised 1-2 June 2021

M

INISTER FOR

Digital Infrastructure Matt Warman (right) and Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham were among a host of engaging speakers at the 5G Realised conference.

The event has been running for three years.

It began as a face-to-face event, then last year it took place virtually and this year it was hybrid. But never before has the title been more apt. What was once an aspiration is now a reality and Burnham, more than anyone, captured that. It’s not about ultra-low latency or enhanced mobile broadband, it’s about how 5G helps people.

Burnham said: “When I came in as mayor, four years ago, I set the ambition of making Greater Manchester the UK’s leading digital city region, and I think we’re making really good progress towards it. The Financial Times reported that we are officially the fastest growing digital and tech hub in Europe.”

But he challenged conference members on the effect of such tech growth. “The question I want to pose to you is, what kind of society does all of this create? That, sometimes, is a question that’s missed out of the exciting debates about tech and the way it’s going.

We are now duty-bound to pose that question, having lived through the year that we’ve just all lived through, where the world has taken a decisive step in a digital direction.”

Burnham worries that lockdown has made a more divided society and that too much focus is on the exciting and the front-end of digital change, while people without access are left behind. “We had our Disabled People’s Panel conduct a survey, and it made for quite frightening reading, with regard to the number of disabled people in Greater Manchester who simply could not afford to be online on a regular basis,” he said.

He’s looking to better connectivity as one of the ways to address this. “With DCMS, we’ve been working on a full fibre pilot for the last few years, where, of course, we’ve partnered with the private sector, with Virgin Media. This

is pushing out 2700 kilometres of new fibre to around 1600 sites across the city region. And they are largely public-sector sites at the moment, so this is where the public-sector side of it comes in. Working with our 10 councils, this is libraries, schools, hospitals, fire stations. So that’s under my remit, as the Mayor of Greater Manchester: traffic signals, community centres. But the idea is that we’re pump-priming the system, and that we’ll then build out from those four public locations, over time.”

He says education on tech is just as important as its uses. He plans to put in place programmes to teach digital skills that will particularly serve older residents, and he sees technology as a great source of jobs. He’s created a very big cyber skills programme. He points out that GCHQ has opened an office in Manchester.

It was good to hear a Labour Party mayor chiming with one of the objectives of the Conservative government. Much of the talk at the conference was about Project Gigabit, the government’s programme to deliver gigabitlike speeds to every home. The government minister, Warman, explained that the majority of this would be delivered by fibre to the premises, but of course it would go hand-inhand with 5G. In some places 5G would be

It is about how 5G helps people

40 uk5g.org

used to deliver the bandwidth and in others the fibre would facilitate the improved 5G roll-out.

One of the projects Warman said he was particularly keen on was the deployment of 5G smart junctions in Manchester. Matching the theme that it’s not about 5G, but what you can do with it, he reckoned that everyone could relate to a technology that led to us spending less time waiting at traffic lights.

Another theme that recurred throughout the event was the use of 5G in particular industries.

Both the Eden Project leaders and the team working with the Green Planet programme, which involves David Attenborough, talked about the ways in which technology could educate people to be more environmentally aware. Two projects looked at 5G in construction and there was a lot of discussion around the enabling technologies of Band 77 and neutral host.

Tony Sceales, Head of Programme Development for 5G at DCMS, explained to minister Matt Warman that, while many of the DCMS Testbeds and Trials projects overlapped, each was pursuing something new and exciting.

The chart they are discussing is a handy guide to how the different projects cover different aspects of implementing 5G technology. There are categories for rural, urban, industrial, manufacturing & construction, health & social care, creative, media & sport, mobility, ports & logistics, and telco supply chain diversification. You can find a copy of the map, which appeared in the last issue of this magazine, at http://cwjp.co.uk/map, or get in touch for a back issue.

A “fireside chat”, albeit without the fire and socially distanced, enabled UK 5G Chair Ros Singleton to quiz the minister about the projects, the initiatives on Open RAN and the future for 5G in the UK. In particular, Warman enthused about the benefits that were being delivered by the Liverpool project working on health and social care, and the Manchester smart junctions programme, which he described as a real-world way through which ordinary people could see the benefits of 5G. The minister explained that the government’s ambition was to have the majority of people in the UK covered for 5G services by 2027, but he said he appreciated that it was not about the numbers but the uses, and cited examples that had been learned from the testbeds and trials.

Warman also expected 5G to help with Project Gigabit as it could be used to reach the places that fibre couldn’t and therefore overbuilding could be avoided. He praised innovative work that had been performed in Scotland and the West Midlands, but he said that the lessons learned there needed to be transferred.

Warman also talked about SONIC, the lab that is

working to build the UK’s understanding of open systems. SONIC’s main purpose is to help with R&D and to accelerate diversity. The minister told Singleton the government was considering international collaboration and had already held conversations with other countries. Warman sought to reassure the industry that, despite the

government’s enthusiasm to bring in new vendors, Nokia and Ericsson would continue to be hugely important. He said it was collaboration between all elements of the 5G ecosystem that was making 5G a success, and that the sector and UK5G deserved the credit for that success rather than government.

The event was hosted in the plush City of London offices of the legal firm Ashurst. Partner Nick Elverston welcomed the attendees with an overview of the balance between infrastructure and use-cases. He said he looked forward to the use of 5G to develop areas such as the internet of things, after its initial deployment “in the pipes” as networks were built. He pointed out that early-stage, small ventures often threw up more complications than bigger, established businesses.

That’s not to say that coverage is a done deal; the conference members discovered that in the meeting room, where most participants could get just a 3G signal.

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Former O2 Chief Technical Officer Brendan O’Reilly now has a similar role at the systems integrator BAI. He told the conference that the two areas of focus for BAI globally were neutral host services for mobile network operators and private networks. BAI is the majority owner of Transit Wireless, which builds, owns and operates one of the world’s largest neutral-host wireless networks on the New York City subway system. It provides MNOs with cellular and wi-fi connectivity for their customers across large infrastructure projects, including the NYC subway. Numerically speaking, it provides 160 miles of fibre to service 283 underground stations on 22 subway lines, serving about 5.3 million travellers on any given weekday.

BAI has just won a 20-year contract to install 4G connectivity in the London underground for the four major MNOs. It’s planning full deployment in three years.

Adrian Talbot is the Head of the Centre of Excellence for Mobility at Spanish-owned construction company Ferrovial Group, which specialises in building infrastructure that keeps people on the move.

While most of the speakers at the 5G Realised events had some link to the DCMS-funded R&D projects, most of the work Ferrovial is doing is commercial deployment and not connected with DCMS. This gave a different perspective and was a valuable contribution to the event.

Ferrovial sees the potential of 5G to increase profit from its airports and roads by 1.6 to 2.2 times. These increases will come from operational improvements and monetising of the data. Talbot described the experience of providing a multi-site, private 5G testbed network as part of the construction of the Silvertown Tunnel, a new River Thames crossing. Initial connectivity is already in place on the south side of the river. The network provides connectivity, site automation, operations and security for Ferrovial and subcontractors.

At Heathrow, one of several airports that Ferrovial co-owns and operates, mobile networks are used to implement digital automation. These networks are used to perform tasks that range from automated debris clearance to docking the planes and improving passenger flows at the terminal.

Talbot explained that implementation of private 5G networks was a struggle, as the necessary device support was absent. “In reality, device manufacturers have not optimised their handsets for the two bands needed, N77 and N78. The antennas, the connectivity, the testing is not there.”

In addition, he said, SIM-locked phones would block the network SIM as they did not recognise it. “The upshot is that very few approved devices are guaranteed to work on a standalone release 15 private network.”

Yet Ferrovial remains bullish about the potential for 5G, particularly for local authorities.

Talbot said that network slicing and quality-ofservice guarantees in particular were benefits for real-world use-cases such as social care, which needed guaranteed uptime, and the emergency services.

There were many positive impacts of these aspects, such as monitoring for fly tipping.

Operators that were disrupted by 5G vandals could take advantage of them for better remote

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monitoring. “5G is a unification technology for many use cases. Your overall capital and operational expenditure will be significantly lower,” he said.

Talbot predicted that the global chip shortage would be here for a while, but that small manufacturers rather than large would struggle.

“DCMS 5G Create projects are struggling to get the numbers of radio-heads and proprietary radio-heads they need. Large players like Nokia or Ericsson are less impacted.”

Talbot praised the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme, saying that Ferrovial cited the supportive UK government-private partnership of 5G Create as a model for the Spanish government to follow.

Stephen Stewart from Factory 42 and Tom Burton from the BBC are working on one of the most glamorous 5G Testbeds and Trials projects: Green Planet AR. It’s trendy not just

because augmented reality is a cool technology but because it’s an immersive link to the 2022 TV series Green Planet, a new series by the country’s most trusted person, Sir David

Attenborough. Stewart explained that, although he is from a software engineering background, he and Factory 42’s 30 staff aim to immerse viewers so deeply in the experience that they don’t notice the technology. Yet the technology drives the project; he referenced the 5G superpowers of bandwidth, latency and coverage. In particular, the company needs latency of less than 20ms so that the perception of lag doesn’t make people feel ill, and to use the power of cloud computing. Stewart defined the key ingredients for AR success as it being shared, portable and dynamic, which together were tricky to achieve: he said that immersive technology had struggled with the shared experience, yet “we need the interactive experience for XR to take off, and interactive struggles with being portable”. He hopes that, when the programme airs in 2022, there will be good indoor 5G coverage. Factory 42, the BBC and EE are also working with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to use AR to solve “plant blindness”. This refers to people’s inability to identify common plants compared with animals and to be blind to the green world around them.

Yogarajah Gopikrishna, known as Gopi, is the Head of the Global Centre of Excellence for Open RAN, which is a major DCMS-funded project to drive Open RAN adoption that is led

by NEC. Gopikrishna said NEC considered Open RAN to be fundamental to the creation of a much larger pool of vendors than existed now, and this would contribute to a thriving vendor ecosystem.

The laboratories that will be operated by the NEC Global Centre of Excellence will provide an enhanced level of interoperability testing and quality assurance, which allows multiple vendors – that previously may not have been considered by one of the major MNOs – to have their products evaluated through working with equipment designed for larger, more mainstream vendors.

The new centre focuses on reliability, performance and tuning of the equipment, so that when it arrives at an MNO, it’s in good shape. “We look for vendors to come to our facilities when they are ready for that final polish, and final productisation. And that includes performance, reliability, stress testing these interfaces, to make sure that they’re carrier-grade, and they are ready to go into an operator as a next step.”

The centre will include performance testing equipment such as load testers, channel simulators, emulators and microwave test equipment to test beam patterns – “a lot of detailed testing, which a very mature vendor like one of the traditional vendors would normally have, but a new innovator may not have access to, not just the equipment but also the knowhow to really bring it to the product test”.

One of the arguments often levelled against open systems is that it’s costly and labour intensive to ensure that products from different vendors work together. Gopikrishna counters: “The cost savings of Open RAN must not be consumed by a system integrator, the cost of bringing a third party to bring it all together. We are very mindful of that and really investing heavily in automation.

“Automation is essential because there are going to be multiple vendors in this ecosystem, bringing different pieces or point components.

They’re all going to have different release cycles.

Without automation, manually getting our test each time an individual component vendor makes a change is going to be an impossible task. So right from the outset, a lot of the focus of this lab will mean automating what we call the continuous integration-continuous delivery process, where each component vendor can properly release their products.”

The centre is able to simulate real-world call traffic and radio propagation, and measure power consumption, which is run automatically through thousands of terminals. The centre is also in discussion with a number of operators to generate opportunities for field evaluation of products coming out of the NEC lab.

Ford Motors Production Engineering Supervisor Paul Hadley was at the event, while his colleague Chris White, Electrification Manager for Europe, joined virtually. They explained the job of the ePrime pilot test facility at Ford’s plant at Dunton in Essex, which is to

develop the techniques for mass production of efficient electric motors that will power Ford vehicles of the future. Because it’s a testbed and does not affect mainstream manufacturing, they have the freedom to experiment. The 5G network is not currently integrated into other

mobile networks or Ford systems; it even uses frequencies away from those that network partner Vodafone considers to be core. These are bands 38 and N78. The deployment uses Ericsson equipment that runs 5G release 15 in non-standalone mode. Ford is interested in moving to release 16, as the enhanced capabilities could enable the tracking of parts.

Ford is investigating a dashboard that will give a “single pane of glass” view of the use of mobile and wi-fi across multiple Ford sites. The project has three cells up and running. The team is also looking at other technologies such as wi-fi 6 and long range. No Ford workers have raised health concerns regarding this deployment; Ford puts this down to its very strict health and safety teams, which the workforce trusts to police the implementation of the technology.

Still very much in the early stage of evaluation, the 5G project is part of Ford’s fundamental manufacturing shift from internal combustion engines to battery power. Hadley sees this becoming business critical over the next two or three years but expects the technology to be applied to new facilities rather than retrofitted to existing production lines.

The topic of barrier busting was tacked by several participants: Bjorn Odenhammar, Ericsson’s Head of Networks & Managed Services Pre-Sales Customer Unit UK & Ireland; Stephen Lerner, General Counsel & Regulatory Affairs Director at Three; Louise Lancaster, Head of Wireless Infrastructure & Spectrum Policy at DCMS and Chair of the barrier busting task force; and Patrick Melia, the Chief Executive of Sunderland City Council, who joined with audio only. The conversation was moderated by Dean Bubley, Founder of consultancy Disruptive Analysis. The major concern for the barrier busters was the difficulty they faced with planning permission for mobile sites. Lerner said that 50 per cent of all applications across the UK were turned down and 100 per cent were refused in London. He argued for reform of the Electronic Communications Code, a watered-down revision of which was introduced in 2017, as he pointed out that of the 38,000 mobile sites in the UK, only 500 had been introduced under the new code.

Odenhammar concurred, saying that gaining access to a railway station just for a site survey could take eight weeks. He argued that more digital champions were needed in local councils.

The participants had certainly found one in Melia, who, much like Manchester mayor Burnham, took the view that 5G was about what it did for people. Sunderland is looking at

building its own multi-operator neutral host network to ensure that it has city-wide coverage without being at the mercy of operators’ whims.

A more contentious discussion centred on equipment supply and local access licensed spectrum as barriers which needed busting.

Odenhammar explained that the margins on equipment were so low that it was not economic for companies to supply the small volumes of equipment that were bought by organisations other than the major MNOs, and that the route to neutral host and private networks was through existing MNO customers.

Lerner of mobile network operator Three was questioned on the granting of local access licence applications to share spectrum, which had not been depolyed.

He claimed that Three had in the past granted them, although he moderated that statement with “we spent a lot of money to buy that spectrum” and “we don’t want to tie up spectrum that we have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on”.

On checking with Ofcom after the event, it transpired that Three had not agreed to any local access licence applications.

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Colin Evison is a Chartered Civil Engineer and Head of Innovation at BAM Nuttall, a large construction company. He’s working with 5G in the Shetland Islands and in a regional Scottish office 40 minutes’ drive from Glasgow, both of

which have poor mobile coverage. Evison described the job as “go big or go home”. It is part of the work to achieve the goals that government set the construction industry in 2013: to be cheaper, faster and greener, with

more exports, by 2025. The ambitious Shetland projects will enable the export of renewable energy to connect Shetland to the UK electricity transmission system for the first time. A substation to convert high-voltage direct current to alternating current, and a wind farm, are being built. The private network will use band 77 shared-access spectrum and will run standalone 5G. It will work as an extension of BAM’s existing IT infrastructure. Initial testing has been done at Belgium-based software solutions company Accelleran, whose lab has readily available N78 equipment.

Evison noted that 5G could not just be imposed on users; there had to be demand. But technology should be welcomed. He gave the example of surveying in challenging environments, for which the human could be replaced by remote devices. BAM is working with Trimble and Boston Dynamics to build surveying equipment into robot dogs, which can traverse a rugged landscape while a human operator in a safer place works the controls using a Microsoft HoloLens.

5G WEEK AWA RD S WINNE RS Event organiser Juliet Media hosted the 5G Week Awards, which focus on the best of the best in 5G adoption, business cases and distribution across the entire ecosystem around the world. The winners were chosen by an independent panel of judges that consisted of Keith Willetts, Co-Founder of 5G Realised; Rosalind Singleton, Chair, UK5G; David Pringle, Writer and Analyst; Tony Sceales, Head of Programme Development, 5G Programme, DCMS – UK Government; and Robert Driver, Head of UK5G. The winners were announced during the 5G Week gala dinner on 2nd June at the Tower Hotel in London.

Most potentially disruptive business model:

Most Innovative Use of 5G Technology

Individual Contributor to 5G Industry Deployment

The Operator with the Best Industry Deployment

WINNER: Multi-Operator

WINNER: 5G Festival – led by Digital Catapult

WINNER: Robert Franks,

5G Forest Ranger

• Mark Stansfeld, Chair, West Midlands 5G, Worcester 5G Testbed and WM5G Leadership

Zeeta Networks – 5G Encode.

O2 for 5pring, Encode and Festival

Neutral Host (MONeH) – led by Telet Research

• Liverpool Create Project • Milton Keynes Create Project

Managing Director, WM5G

• Northumbrian Water using 5G to enable AR mapping of underground pipes – led by O2

• Ian Smith, Programme Director, 5G Testbeds and Trials, DCMS – UK Government for 5GTT

The Most Significant Vertical Sector Deployment by a Vendor

• Ben Turner, Engagement Manager , WM5G

WINNER: Live and Wild – led by aql and Candour Productions 5G Encode – led by Zeeta Networks

• Mike Short, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for International Trade (DIT) • Katherine Ainley, Chief Executive Officer of Ericsson UK & Ireland

• AI-based traffic signal system – led by Vivacity Labs

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WINNER:

BT for Edge/XR O2 for WM5G 5pring accelerator, and 5G Encode and 5G Festival

Who are cellXica?

There is a small British company in Cambridge that has been making mobile-phone base stations for ten years. Yet even people steeped in the industry have never heard of cellXica.

T

he combination of wavemobile and its sister company cellXica follow a kind of Russian-doll approach to mobile technology.

Buried deep inside the base station is what cellXica most wants to improve; the hardest bit of mobile technology, known as the physical layer or layer 1.

This is where the real radio engineering happens; where analogue meets digital and where the cleverest of clever people turn specifications and formulae into hardware. Wrapped around this is the software and hardware that make a mobilephone base station. And wrapped around that are the services provided by wavemobile, which takes the cellXica equipment and builds it into an entire mobile network with 5G-capable cores from Quortus and Attocore, spectrum licences and interconnection.

Chief Technology Officer at cellXica, Niro Mahasinghe, explains the relationship between cellXica and wavemobile: “cellXica is a technology-driven company that does all the low-level modem design, and wavemobile develops real-world applications. We don’t typically sell things off the shelf. Hardware reference design licensing means we do one design, and license it to several manufacturers.”

There is something very Cambridge about cellXica. Products are 100% designed and engineered in the UK – the hardware, the stack, the physical layer, it’s all British. It’s a small company of just 22 people; and it doesn’t seek world domination or a stock-market listing. The company doesn’t even have a sales person.

Instead, it concentrates on designs, which it licenses to other companies to manufacture in volume. There is a common theme among Cambridge companies: they are most interested in fundamental, deep-technology challenges. This is what makes the science parks around the city so inspiring to visit.

Soft Hardware The company started in 2011 by developing 4G software-defined radio, or SDR. It was enabled by the development of the Zynq chip by Xilinx Inc. This chip is a FPGA with hardened ARM cores, a class of device that bridges the gap between hardware and software. It’s hardware, but the design of the hardware can be reprogrammed.

Mahasinghe says: “That’s the exciting thing; at that time RF technology was locked into the chip

design process, so Zynq came in at the right time.

Based on ARM cores, it made it quite possible for us to have a chip which was more like a systemon-a-chip, you can have high-speed digital design on it. So we wrote all of the LTE base station physical layer and the protocol stack ourselves.”

The work was prescient. SDR is a technology that has spent decades being the next big thing - by the time cellXica was formed, many had written it off as a pipe-dream. Today it’s become the universal technology used for 5G. As a niche product supplier, cellXica has some very special customers, with military or search and rescue comms being typical applications.

This leads to interesting differences between cellXica and mobile network equipment vendors.

When reliability is very much a matter of life and death, it concentrates the mind on the design priorities. When deployment means having a base station that can be flown, or carried by someone parachuting into harm’s way and which needs to run reliably on batteries, a lot of thought must go into efficiency. And when command and control is within a fairly small area, it has to be a private network with no need for backhaul.

To meet the demands of these customers, cellXica has taken its physical layer, protocol stack and equally impressive SDR and wrapped them up into a range of base stations with different features and form factors. Out of this has come a couple of units that have mainstream appeal for industry and private networks. The eXsite-M3Q is a small cell capable of supporting up to 32 users including limited LTE-M, while the eXsite-SC6 is its bigger brother, which uses the Marvell OCTEON Fusion-M SoC as the modem and can link 512 devices. Both are currently 4G; 5G is in the works.

The technology cellXica builds deviates a little from convention, which cellXica is not afraid to do in order to provide a practical solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem. For instance, the company has patented its GiLTE, pronounced “guilty”, technology, which stands for GSM-inLTE. That’s GSM as in 2G and LTE as in 4G, which means that this radio can do both at the same time, with the GSM part embedded within the LTE carrier. That’s especially exciting in the UK when a company wants to use the shared access licence part of band 3. This is available to any organisation that wants to use it on a first-come first-served basis by stipulating a postcode within which it will be used and applying to Ofcom.

cellXica products are 100% British innovations, designed and manufactured in the UK

Photography Stuart Berman

Flying the Flag Spectrum liberalisation is a driver for a number of British innovations. It means more demand for units such as the SC6, and that in turn means increased volumes and so reduced prices. In particular, having honed the design using Zynq, cellXica can commit to the volumes necessary to produce a system-on-a-chip design.

While the start-up costs of making an SoC are very high, the individual component prices are low. Better still, they use less power.

Mahasinghe enthuses about the SC6.

“It is our commercial-grade base station, for high capacity. Things like stadiums, for example, It’s perfect for that - where you don’t need lots of power, but there’s a lot of users in a very small area and for that, you can have four 90-degree sectors covering 128 uses in each sector.”

The spectrum it uses is flexible, up to 4GHz, which takes in half of the easily licensable N77 3.8GHz to 4.2GHz band.

Bandwidth is up to 80MHz, which allows for very fast internet access.

As cellXica devices are technologydriven and contain GiLTE, they are ideal for the community radio projects typified by the 5G Testbeds and Trials, Rural Connected Communities projects. In many rural locations, there will be a long-term need to support 2G as well as 4G, so the GiLTE technology is a very flexible solution that solves a the “voice” problem.

The company is looking to grow its international business, again through wavemobile and similar partners, and in particular by supporting community radio projects that use the citizens’ broadband radio service. The company is working with partners to build OpenRAN systems by supplying hardware to vendors that integrate their own software.

Mahasinghe doesn’t take his work home with him - It’s already there. He has a cellXica base station at his house with full network connectivity. wavemobile has the interconnect and spectrum licences, cellXica provides the hardware.

Having a network for just one home would be a bit like having a private railway or power station - it’s significant infrastructure - but it’s a solution to the poor coverage he has in his back garden, which occurs despite the flat terrain around the city of Ely in the fen region of Cambridgeshire.

Visit www.cellXica.net

The Best of 5G in the UK The 5G ecosystem is thriving. Organisations big and small, across all four nations, are trialling 5G networks, which will have an impact on residents from Scotland’s Orkney to those in rural Wales. And it’s already fuelling innovation. Supported by the government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and through the work of innovative organisations and enterprises, people are benefiting from better connectivity and access to important services, improved transport, rich digital visitor experiences, and so much more. The societal benefits are clear and soon the economic advantages will be too. In addition to empowering people nationwide, 5G should play a central role in rebuilding the UK economy post-pandemic.

Photography unsplash.com

I

N SCOTLA ND, 5G R AILNEXT

has tested the technical capacities and creative possibilities of 5G networks in a tough environment: the historic Glasgow Subway system.

The project, which has now finished, used nextgeneration technology to supply digital connectivity in a mass transit setting — improving passenger experience while creating new revenue streams for operators, advertisers and media owners through interactive media channels. This global collaboration between the UK and South Korea, which also tested the technical capabilities and creative possibilities of 5G on the busy Seoul metro, clearly shows the potential and versatility of 5G even within challenging environments.

“We’ve been focusing our efforts on testing the suitability of mid-range frequencies for achieving a high bandwidth but also longdistance coverage,” says David Crawford, Lecturer in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, which is a partner in the 5G RailNext project.

“We built a demonstrator trial system to work out how to deploy the connectivity and where to put the equipment and decided on pointing the aerial down the tunnel between two stations.” The team then used the network to create an interactive experience, whereby customers could use virtual reality to try on shoes from fashion brands. “This is something that was not possible before,” says Crawford.

“You need really strong connectivity.”

“The opportunities for rail are very significant,” says Peter Shearman, Head of Innovation at Cisco UKI. “To be able to test and demonstrate evidence for a fast network on Glasgow’s underground is a huge, important feat. Strathclyde Partnership for Transport is a really interesting, passionate and forwardthinking transport operator; sustainability is very important for them and the digital experience of their ridership is, too. It’s been an extremely changeable time since we started doing the project, especially in terms of crowds, but now we have something that can positively contribute to a passenger’s

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experience as the UK starts to open up.”

In Orkney, the second most poorly connected part of the UK, the 5G New Thinking project is empowering rural communities. The plan is to provide residents with the capacity to build and operate their own commercially viable 5G wireless networks, extending practical guidance and support. Around 66 per cent of the UK landmass is currently dominated by four mobile network operators.

Following a conventional business model, they typically use spectrum licences to design, build, own and operate their own networks, which are then marketed directly to customers.

But the high capital costs of targeting a small market means MNOs tend to focus investment in areas with high population density and, as a result, people in rural areas face poor connections. A new business model is therefore crucial to boost coverage — a longstanding priority for Ofcom, which recently committed to encouraging investment in broadband and mobile connectivity across the UK. “It’s really important that the nations have the tools to shape their connected future,” says Shearman. “This has mattered for a long time in the UK, which is why Ofcom looks at regions and nations as an important area of analysis in their own right. Whether we’re talking about fixed networks or cellular, we know that there are certain regions, and even nations, that struggle with investment in connectivity — usually due to not being the so-called optimal demographic or population density.

Unfortunately, it’s just more expensive and less profitable.”

CONNECTED COMMUNITIES Neutral hosting will allow third parties, such as residents and local business owners, to build and own radio infrastructure by working with MNOs to reduce costs and make coverage commercially sustainable. 5G New Thinking will also provide a toolkit to enable rural communities to seize control of their connectivity needs. “The idea is that it will educate and inform. It will probably start quite basic, identifying local needs, but then will also include information about applying for a licence and how to operate as a business,” Crawford says. “It’s not an easy task but there are major advantages to community-led structures and of course, to connectivity.”

Rural industries require empowerment to thrive. They account for some of the UK’s largest food and drink exports —

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for example, farmed salmon, the suppliers of which rely heavily on technology and are currently being held back due to limited networks. Analysis from 5G RuralFirst suggests that, over a 10-year period, the UK’s rural economy could grow by an additional £17bn if good-quality 5G services were made available.

ORKNEY SPIRIT Shearman continues: “Local communities need a way to capitalise network development, and 5G, at least in this regard, is no different.

Certainly, if you’re a mobile operator or a traditional subscriber-led business model, 5G is going to have very similar investment characteristics. Since the return is generally in personal data allowances and subscriber volume, it is a critical mass-density question.

However, 5G offers a way to disaggregate the investment case from the service delivery. And this is now more possible than it has ever been.

5G New Thinking is genuinely a leading-edge example.”

Orkney is the perfect location for testing.

“They have a spirit of independence and a

PETER SHEARMAN track record of community investment in infrastructure,” says Shearman. “This willingness to encourage self-providing communities is very important for us to try out our ideas for 5G. On the other hand, local residents need to be persuaded of the benefits and become excited about the participation.”

So how do you achieve this critical mass adoption? “Outreach is, of course, essential.”

Similarly, 5G Wales Unlocked is demonstrating the commercial viability of 5G deployment in remote areas to drive investment in connectivity across rural Wales.

In 2019, 43 per cent of the Welsh landmass, mainly rural areas, was still without 4G coverage. The project is focusing on four usecase themes that emphasise how 5G connectivity can be a powerful force for good in remote and semi-rural areas, opening up new opportunities for businesses and individuals. Although the group’s solutions are technical, they prioritise communities, working with the general public to identify the societal and economic opportunities that will benefit people most and that will overcome any challenges.

“At Raglan Castle we will use 5G to preserve the past and demonstrate the future,” says David Warrender, 5G Programme Director at the Welsh Government. “We will monitor the structural health and environmental conditions of parts of the castle, including tilt, temperature and humidity. This will allow our partner, Cadw, which is the Welsh Government’s historic environment service working for an accessible and well-protected historic environment, to understand how this technology can protect the historic buildings, structures and heritage sites of Wales.”

F O U R N AT I O N S I N 5 G

A

DDITIONAL PLA NS

include delivery of an immersive tourism experience, which will enable visitors to gain a real insight into the past using augmented reality, and monitoring the site for unusual activity to ensure greater security. “This is a real partnership effort between the public and private sectors, as well as people working in academia. Alongside the Welsh Government, Cadw and Monmouthshire County Council, we have Cisco’s camera technology, UtterBerry’s sensors, BT’s network and know-how, Jam Creative’s augmented reality and Cardiff University’s video analytics,” explains Warrender. “It is a real team-Wales effort to make the most of one of our national assets.”

“This is a very different investment case to 5G New Thinking,” says Shearman. “All areas need intervention, but the view from Wales is that there is already a lot of demand here; they believe that if they are provided with connectivity, then the money will follow. The project is therefore highlighting that the country’s digital sectors are growing massively and problems associated with distance are

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Around 66 per cent of the UK landmass is currently dominated by four mobile network operators.

under control. Wales also have sway over their spending in a way that other nations do not, and are very keen to incentivise this.”

England is spoilt for choice. In the south, on the Isle of Wight, the organisers of the Connected Cowes project plan to explore the use of 5G at one of the longest-running regular regattas in the world, Cowes Week. Highdefinition 360-degree cameras will be fitted to 50 boats in 2021’s regatta. Each camera will beam back real-time, high-definition pictures to the CowesLive TV presentation. This will be shown on big screens around the town and will

be available on the internet worldwide. A virtual reality lounge on The Parade in Cowes will additionally enable spectators to don headsets and be transported out to one of the 50 boats to see exactly what’s going on across The Solent. The creation of engaging content should widen the audience’s understanding of sailing and its appeal, with 5G-powered VR additionally being used as a gateway to teaching the sport.

AMAZON EXPERIENCE The Eden Project in Cornwall is similarly looking at how 5G and 360-degree video cameras can enhance the visitor experience.

Virtual visitors who are unable to visit the Eden site will be able to experience the exhibits and talks from their home, care home, school or other locations via a desktop, mobile or virtualreality device and be taken on a real-time VR tour. What’s more, the local 5G infrastructure will provide real-time data on core services such as energy and water management and then be fed into the site management systems, such as plant maintenance. Dan James, the Eden Project’s Development

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In 2019, 43 per cent of the Welsh landmass, mainly rural areas, was still without 4G coverage.

Director, says: “We are looking forward to testing just how 5G can help support our educational, arts and community programmes and provide new and exciting reasons for people to keep visiting us in person or virtually.”

M

OV I N G N O R T H I N

England, 5G Ports, a project at the Port of Felixstowe, is using 5G internet-of-things devices and predictive data analytics to reduce unscheduled downtime of cranes, boosting the productivity of the operation of the port’s shipto-shore gantry cranes. And further north still, 5G is driving operational efficiencies and improving productivity in the North East.

Nissan, Sunderland Council, the North East Motor Manufacturers Group and Three are developing a globally unique centre of excellence and operational test facility for connected automated logistics at the Nissan Sunderland site. They will deliver 5G-connected, autonomous 40-tonne trucks to distribute parts and assemblies across the Nissan plant and to link to many local small and medium-sized businesses in their supply chain.

IRISH INVESTMENT Over the water in Northern Ireland, 5G is accelerating Belfast Harbour’s ambition to become the world’s best regional smart port.

BT, in a first for the UK, will build and manage a live 5G private network, which is expected to go live across large parts of the 2,000-acre site this year. The deployment will enable the harbour — which is a significant contributor to

the regional economy and an important gateway to trade — to drive operational efficiencies through the optimisation of processes across transport, logistics, the supply chain and shipping. In addition, it will explore how use of 5G and other emerging technologies can enhance safety, security and sustainability across the port and other parts of Belfast city. Plans include the rollout of 5G-enabled sensors to monitor air quality and 5G remote-controlled inspection technology to reduce the need for staff to work at height.

“There’s a huge hunger for 5G investment in Northern Ireland, particularly in the rural areas,” says Kate Clifford, Director at Rural Community Network, which is a regional voluntary organisation established by rural community groups in 1991 to articulate the voice of rural communities on issues relating to poverty, disadvantage and equality. The membership organisation, which is managed by a voluntary board of directors, has partnered with 5G New Thinking to stimulate better access to connectivity in Northern Ireland’s rural areas. They aim to create communities that can thrive economically while also remaining sustainable. “We’ve seen the enormous life-changing potential of 5G in Orkney, one of the most remote areas of the UK, and so, if it can be successfully trialled there, then we can do it here too.

“Broadband is as essential as electricity and water,” she continues. “Yet rural areas in Northern Ireland remain poorly underserved.”

The role of Rural Community Network in 5G New Thinking will also facilitate discussions between key stakeholders and local residents

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about how 5G can address their wants and needs. “The possibilities are really exciting,” says Nigel McKinney, a project worker at Rural Community Network. “The pandemic has highlighted the importance of good connectivity. It’s essential for remote working and decentralising jobs, but then also we’re starting to think about how far we can take it.”

For example, tourism and environmentalism could be revolutionised. The health benefits, in addition, are huge. Poor mental health, isolation, loneliness and difficulty with access to professional treatment are all common problems for those living in remote, rural areas, and new-generation technology has the potential to change this. 5G also offers a great opportunity for Northern Ireland to utilise its new, critical position as a border between the UK and the EU. “Northern Ireland has a unique strategy and approach to solving infrastructure and connectivity problems,” says Shearman. “The country is very different in terms of activity and the environment, but that’s why the transfer and ability of what we have built in other communities, such as Orkney, is so important.

It’s a simple and versatile recipe for this reason. We’re ready and willing for Northern Ireland to be a fast follower in the models that we are currently adopting and refining elsewhere.”

It’s important to emphasise that partnerships within the four nations are essential to the successful rollout of 5G. There are several different elements within both the private and public spheres that need to come together to achieve UK-wide innovation. “And that’s exactly where we’ve been driving our attention,” says Shearman. “We’re keen to solidify these relationships to ensure that everyone is bringing their particular specialism, and utilising this expertise for its full potential, to make sure these new, exciting models work.

Collaboration is absolutely crucial.”

Vicki DeBlasi

Head of Marketing UK5G

Having worked as a marketer in the technology industry for more than 15 years, DeBlasi is fascinated by ways in which complex subjects can be made relevant and engaging for different audiences. She has worked with the 5G Testbeds and Trials programme since it started and is fully versed in the processes, people and projects.

S5GConnect programme - the driving force behind developing opportunities for 5G in Scotland

T

he role of the Scotland 5G Centre is to establish Scotland as a country ready and able to support users of the next generation of services in connectivity and wireless communications. The S5GConnect programme, funded by the Scottish government, is accelerating this ambition through the rollout of 5G hubs in cities and rural locations that span the country.

Each hub is established around business enterprise, academic and corporate opportunities that already exist in the areas and are supported by local authorities, academia and enterprise agencies. This innovative approach develops sectors in locations where there is already an appetite or need for innovation.

The S5GConnect programme will be the catalyst to place Scotland at the forefront of digital connectivity.

Direct Access to Key Target Industry Sectors The SG5Connect programme gives potential collaborators an opportunity to gain direct access to key target sectors and partners by using market intelligence already gathered by the Scotland 5G Centre.

Access to this knowledge will provide the opportunity to link up with high-growth potential start-ups and scale-ups, and to build on and utilise existing public- and privatesector investment. The spirit of collaboration is already in place to recognise and capture growth, and the hubs will provide a cluster of use cases with the intention of creating viable market opportunities.

Developing an Ecosystem with Key Players Deployment of 5G is driven by the development of an ecosystem with key players that work together to create viable use cases and unlock the value of and potential for investment.

The S5GConnect programme is a £4m funding package to support the establishment of these hubs to stimulate collaboration between industry partners, small businesses, academia, local authorities, economic agencies and government bodies.

Open for Business and Regionally Relevant There are currently three hubs open and ready for engagement in the Forth Valley, Dundee and Dumfries.

More are planned.

Each one has been designed to be regionally relevant and to ensure that the benefits of 5G align with the challenges and opportunities of the local communities. Designed to be a welcoming and enabling space for 5G innovation, whatever your current level of 5G expertise the hubs all work to encourage the formation of an ecosystem for entrepreneurs to exploit these new capabilities – not just the business and economic benefits, but social and environmental benefits too.

All the hubs will have 5G mobile private networks to give a safe space for innovation in a sandbox environment to test products, services and solutions on live, albeit closed, networks.

Supporting Innovation and Growth in the Central Belt, Dundee and Dumfries In the Forth Valley hub, at the heart of Scotland’s central belt, is a partnership between academia and a telecommunications provider, which is developing a green data recovery platform that will support Scotland’s net zero economy ambition. In Dundee, the hub will support ways in which 5G, with immersive and interactive technologies and virtual reality, can be used by the strong local gaming sector. It will also work in partnership to explore opportunities to use 5G with IoT and sensor-based systems for better management of buildings, delivery of healthcare and manufacturing productivity. S5GConnect’s and Scotland’s first rural 5G hub in Dumfries will harness technological expertise and academic research to use 5G to transform southern Scotland’s communities and economies. Projects include the development of agritech solutions and remote healthcare initiatives to support assisted living.

scotland5gcentre.org/  @scot5gcentre  scotland-5g-centre/about/ 

A series of virtual events that explore opportunities to be part of the S5GConnect programme will take place from June, with in-person events planned from September.

Register your interest today by visiting scotland5g centre.org/ events/

Imran Shafi

F

I V E Y E A R S AG O ,

DCMS added digital to its remit to become the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which reflected the importance of technology in our everyday lives. As tech became ever more important, the role of Director of Digital Infrastructure was

created, and the new person in that chair is Imran Shafi.

Having only started the job in April, he’s on something of a learning curve, but he has an impressive pedigree. For three years he was the Prime Minister’s private secretary, working most recently on Covid but across public services, which included DCMS. Before that Shafi was with McKinsey for nearly four years;

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before that, at the Treasury, working on publicspending and energy tax policies.

Of course, it’s hard to start a job during a lockdown. The best way to understand the 5G Testbeds and Trials, and the other programmes that DCMS is working on in 5G, is to get out and visit them, but of course that hasn’t been possible. Still, he’s starting to get a feel for the projects. He told us: “What has impressed me

D I R E C T O R O F D I G I TA L I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

We’re only at the very start of what the impacts of 5G will be on the economy

Photography Stuart Berman

a lot is the breadth of the work that we’re doing with so many different partners across the industry and with local authorities, and the excitement, the passion that everybody has, for what we’re looking to achieve together is really exciting.”

Shafi has come in as an outsider rather than with a technology or telecommunications background. That places an interesting perspective on what has surprised him: “I think I haven’t fully understood that we’re only at the very start of what the impacts of 5G will be on the economy. I think if you asked the average customer in the street, they would say, it’s probably just like 4G but a little bit faster. But in its true form, it’s more, much more

revolutionary in what it will mean for the economy and how we live our lives. It’s really exciting to see where that will go.”

The pandemic has had an influence on people’s approach to 5G. Ofcom reports that while we may have expected a drop in the use of mobile data as people have been working from home and using wi-fi, that has not happened. Mobile data usage has continued its inexorable increase while use of wi-fi and home broadband has also increased. This puts an emphasis on the need to improve suburban capacity. “Everybody now recognises just how important a good connection to the internet is, wherever you are and whoever you are. The pandemic has shown the importance of government in ensuring that getting that connection to as many people as you possibly can is done as quickly as you possibly can.”

WORKING TOGETHER Shafi sees co-operation as the route for doing this: “We’ve got a really positive relationship across government. I think everybody recognises there’s a huge amount to do, especially on newer agendas like supply chain diversification. We can have some impact as ourselves and a whole load more impact when we work with like-minded partners. And the way we do that is through using the brilliant network of diplomats and trade experts we’ve got across the world.”

Two new DCMS-led programmes reflect the goals of improving the options that operators and others have both for siting cells and for the choices of where they buy the equipment from. The Digital Connectivity Infrastructure Accelerator (see page 7) looks at understanding the options for using things such as streetlamps, while FRANC (see right) is a programme for RAN innovation.

There is also the co-operation system that’s run by UK5G. The pandemic has also impacted this; there have been no events.

Before lockdown there were a couple a week, but the Director of Digital Infrastructure sees the value of the organisation in championing and showcasing the power of 5G to all businesses and to consumers.

He describes the UK5G network of networks as “hugely important”. “What we can do to support adoption across a lot of companies that might not necessarily have the understanding themselves of what this technology can deliver will be instrumental to ensuring that the UK makes the most of 5G as quickly as possible.”

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BRITISH FRANC The Future RAN Competition – FRANC – is the latest DCMS-backed funding round to help build the UK’s 4G and 5G ecosystem. It will allocate up to £30 million of R&D funding to projects that support the government’s 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy.

FRANC takes a broad definition of Open RAN. It embraces the whole of the network, not just the radio component, and will fund projects that provide alternatives to proprietary interfaces to allow components from multiple suppliers to work together. Projects do not have to conform to formal Open RAN definitions. Many companies will welcome this, as they think the need to comply with the standards is an overhead that slows deployment.

The programme is looking for applications from both businesses and academic institutions to grow the supply chain and to develop more key intellectual property in Britain. The diversification strategy identified R&D as a barrier to entry for new suppliers. The FRANC will encourage more private-sector innovation to accelerate 5G deployment in the UK and boost export sales.

The competition is part of a wide-ranging government response to the challenge of diversifying the UK’s supply market for telecommunications technology. It spans a range of areas, including: the development of physical hardware; software/virtualised solutions; testing with live networks; and accelerating and pulling forward the development of interoperable technologies.

The government is already making investments to bolster this ecosystem in the form of the SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre, or SONIC, and the UK Telecoms Lab. FRANC will complement those initiatives by providing support to companies that are developing technology rather than testbed infrastructure. Consortia are encouraged to make use of existing testbeds and other facilities funded by 5G Testbeds and Trials, as well as private-sector laboratories and testbed infrastructure.

The deadline for applications is 27th August 2021. Grants ranging from £250,000 to £5 million will be made available to individual projects that last up to 18 months.

For more information see: https://www.gov.uk/ guidance/future-ran-diversifying-the-5gsupply-chain

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I OT N E E D S 5 G

Unlike the move from 3G to 4G, the transition to 5G has been fairly seamless. It is expected that 5G coverage will have reached 60 per cent of the world’s population by 2026, making it the fastest ever mobile network deployment. Chris Williams looks into his crystal ball.

O

VER THE NEXT

decade, 5G will play some, if not a critical, part in transforming every industry. Success will be driven by the options it provides to application developers, businesses and consumers.

As well as offering the well-known features of high capacity and low latency, 5G promises to improve coverage in rural areas, provide better building penetration and offer highavailability networks to the point where service can be assured. These network features mean we’re moving from a one-size-fits-all solution to application-specific choices and dedicated, refined solutions. To do this we need to understand which applications will be the early adopters and decide what else needs to happen for the 5G promise to be realised.

Most internet-of-things devices are engineered to be ultra-low cost. Fitting an expensive 5G radio could make them uneconomic. How appropriate the technology is depends on which part of 5G the application

requires. The current low-power, wide-area network, or LPWAN, in the form of LTE-M and narrow-bandwidth IoT, will continue to evolve as part of 5G specifications, supporting lowpower, low-cost devices and opening up opportunities. NB-IoT & LTE-M will open the door for massive-IoT device applications.

Experience has shown that costs of data on 5G are likely to remain the same. But it’s worth noting that we’re currently in the new radio part of the 5G rollout, in which the core part of the network remains LTE. Applications that demand high capacity, ultra-low latency, high availability and servicelevel agreements will require dedicated networks, support and more complex solution components that lead to overall higher costs.

These higher costs will be justified by the very nature of the type of applications of the highend services. Take a moment to imagine that the year is 2025 and think about how the digital landscape has changed. Let’s assume that 3G has been consigned to history. A little 2G is hanging on, particularly in the UK, to support historical, hard-to-reach devices such as utility meters. LPWAN, NB-IoT and LTE-M

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rollouts have been complete for some time and they provide the ubiquitous coverage and roaming agreements that, in 2021, the industry craved. LTE-4G has benefited from the release of the spectrum previously used by 2G and 3G, due to its widespread adoption and low cost compared with 5G technology. It remains a viable option for many IoT applications; however, 5G is now fully operational. We see dedicated 5G networks supporting a range of applications from immersive gaming, healthcare and industry robotics to the beginning of the realisation of driverless cars.

Monitoring and management of energy and utilities have been revolutionised. Electric vehicles are far better supported by an upgraded connectivity ecosystem, so it has become far more realistic for the majority of vehicles to be electric and charged from home, thanks to the support of 5G. This is a future we are well on our way to.

Standardisation in the form of the 3GPP standards 15, 16, 17 and 18 provide a clear path, giving service providers and application developers assurances around the availability of LPWAN and 4G LTE as we progress to 5G. Collaboration within the IoT ecosystem will be key to making the most of 5G. It will inform the ways in which devices and applications interact with the network, as processing will occur on the device, the edge and the core as appropriate. Collaboration between device manufacturers, application developers, application programming interfaces and mobile network operators, as well as the availability of open resources will determine optimisation for each application.

Just like anything new, there will be teething problems, but it’s clear that the advantages outweigh any bumps in the road.

Rollout is quite slow and that’s just as well otherwise our infrastructure would be overloaded by data. Cell sites require updating, particularly the physical links between the sites and networks. Once updates are in place, we can begin to virtualise the network, making any future rollouts far simpler.

By 2025, much of the world should be experiencing true 5G. This is when we’ll begin to see big changes, exciting leaps in the tech world. LPWAN will be taking care of use cases such as smart cities, agritech and metering, which require frequent connections but only deal in small amounts of data. The connectivity will enable us to make exciting changes in artificial intelligence, industrial decision-making and utilities.

We can expect seamless transitions between wi-fi and 5G to make for a very comfortable user experience.

The technologies of electronic SIMs and universal integrated circuit cards sit alongside 5G. Having eSIM hardware and eUICC software in place is an excellent way to futureproof. It’s hoped that it will be possible to update current 4G SIMs seamlessly by using over-the-air updates when 5G profiles become available.

EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS It’s not just the advances in individual use cases, but how they can be combined to add even further value that is exciting.

In agriculture, more precise weather prediction will aid decisions regarding watering, planting and fertilisation.

Connectivity will help to bridge the divide between urban and rural areas by providing access, information and decisionmaking through the whole supply chain rather than just parts of it.

With the ever-growing concern about climate change, it is imperative that we improve how we manage energy and water usage. Utilities will be pioneers of 5G, no doubt with high costs, initially, but with a great deal to gain.

Once our infrastructure has been upgraded, we can expect to see incredibly accurate monitoring, which will enable up-to-the-minute data on energy and water usage, flood risk and leak detection. Visual inspections that employ unmanned aerial vehicles will become the fastest and safest way to manage

infrastructure, whether in routine checks or after natural disasters, accidents or weather events.

Today, most smart meters use 2G but, as manufacturers future-proof devices by opting for LPWA modules, we will see improvements in at-home utility monitoring. This will enable consumers to control their energy usage and to see the benefits of choosing low-powered lighting and technology in their homes.

Therefore, they will be encouraged to use smart technology and, in turn, to reduce their energy and water usage and wastage.

While 5G will be more expensive than 4G in the short term, in the long term, redevelopment led by utilities will accelerate the adoption of smart city technologies. Collaboration with telecommunications companies will encourage the offering of faster and faster data transmission rates, which will enable data sharing and monitoring that can bring to our fingertips building and road management, connected lighting and more. Utilities will also benefit from being able to provide services to remote locations in a way that has not been possible before.

The ability to construct private 5G networks will prove popular, with benefits including greater security than is possible in commercial networks, lower latency, improved coverage, and even the ability to operate when power sources are unavailable.

Industry will enjoy new and improved possibilities, particularly in the areas of machine learning, AI and industrial decision-making, particularly edge network decisions. This will be a real bonus when it comes to streamlining business practices, reducing losses and increasing security and safety.

Choosing the right connectivity solution is key to being ready for 5G. For example, use of eSIMs is a good option for high data-use cases, in order to avoid having to change SIMs in hard-to-reach or mobile devices.

LPWA is still the best future-proofed option for low-data applications, especially if you are designing and developing right now.

A fantastic example of this can be found in Voi Technology’s electric scooters. The scooters are supplied with global eSIMs, which currently work with 4G LTE. These are an

Utilities will be the pioneers of 5G with a great deal to gain

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excellent choice because over-the-air updates are likely to be available and therefore a seamless upgrade to 5G will be possible. By opting for this solution, Voi has futureproofed its e-scooters; the company won’t have to spend time and money on expensive hardware updates or software deployments.

Nordic Semiconductor has also thought ahead when it comes to designing and developing its wireless connectivity solutions; it has opted for LPWA modules. Its nRF9160 session initiation protocol works on 4G and 5G; the integrated modem supports both LTE-M and NB-IoT; it can operate globally; and it enables OTA upgrades. This is an example of technology ready for the future but able to work fully in the current climate, or, as Nordic Semiconductor puts it: “The nRF9160 SiP is 5G-ready but the marketing success is not reliant on 5G rollout.”

NAVIGATING THE CELLULAR ECOSYSTEM The advent of 5G can feel unsettling.

Technology can advance at such a speed that often it may seem as if you have just got to grips with one development when another comes rushing in. The joy of switching from 4G to 5G can be found in the ease with which it will occur; there will be a lot less need for new hardware thanks to OTA updates. The key is to get into the best position now by starting to move towards LPWA solutions.

Chris Williams

Head of Solutions & Service, Arkessa

Chris is responsible for pre and post sales success, as well as managing the Customer Service team. He is a key point of delivery for customer feedback, including EmPort, a platform that allows enterprises to optimise manageability of connected assets. Williams’ role is to oversee the success of Arkessa’s products, ensuring they are fit for purpose. He ensures that key customer requirements are followed up and if applicable included in any product updates. For over 10 years Arkessa has been a technology leader in cellular connectivity to IoT and M2M markets providing access across multiple radio access technologies including 2G/3G/4G/NB-IoT and LTEM through our EmPort platform. Arkessa has recently become part of the Wireless Logic Group, giving their customers access to greater coverage and an increased range of capabilities and products.

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Band of Others The mobile network operators have licensed spectrum, but if you are not one of them, you have other options. Peter Gradwell looks at shared-access licences.

Photographic Manipulation Stuart Berman

Once a developer has committed to using the benefits of 5G, console and PC games can be moved to mobile

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LOCAL ACCESS LICENCES

Illustration Pat Higgins

CREDIT TO GO HERE

 phiggins80

W

HEN MANSOOR

Hanif, then Chief Technical Officer at Ofcom, announced that new spectrum bands would be made available for use by organisations other than the major mobile network operators, the reaction was mixed. Today this model is seen around the world as revolutionary and one to follow.

Three bands were announced: bands 3, 77 and 258. By far the most interesting was band 77, which runs from 3.8 to 4.2 GHz. That mixed reaction ranged from delight that there was so much spectrum available to disappointment that it was in a frequency range with no device support.

Two years on both these reactions hold but to lesser extents. The initial enthusiasm for a band that was 400MHz wide, and the promise of exceptionally fast fixed-mobile access, have been moderated by Ofcom’s restricted allowance of only 100MHz per applicant, while devices that support the frequencies are starting to appear.

The announcement of these bands was made at the Cambridge Wireless International Conference, in June 2019. Hanif said then that releasing the spectrum was a first step, and that once it was available devices would appear, particularly since this spectrum was licensed in Japan and that America looked likely to follow. This has proved to be true, with other countries joining in. Hanif has since left Ofcom to work on Neom, a fabulously ambitious smart-city project in the Middle East.

DEVICE DROUGHT As more and bigger markets supported Band 77, there was an incentive for device manufacturers to supply relevant kit, but it’s important to understand why many handsets may say Band 77 on the spec sheet but might not actually work.

Band 77 is non-operator spectrum. Operators buy the vast majority of handsets. Most people get a new phone free or discounted when they sign a contract.

The major handset manufacturers have three top priorities when they consider which features to include. Overwhelmingly the most important of these is what the operators have specified. Meeting the requirements of customers with very exacting specifications is tough, and often leads to internal battles between sales people, who are responsible for different operators, to get their work done first. As band 77 spectrum is not on any of the operators’ lists, it won’t be in the requirements.

As shipping deadlines are very tight, manufacturers may never get to the second priority, which is the addition of features that

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BAND 258 Much is made of 5G’s support for millimetre wave, so called because the wavelength is less than one centimetre.

In truth, the frequency that is used for band 258 is over 12cm, but in common parlance anything that is of a high frequency is known as millimetre wave.

Band 258, which Ofcom licenses in the UK, runs from 24.25 to 26.5 GHz – a huge 2.25GHz of contiguous spectrum.

That opens the possibility for significant data throughput; if you used all the spectrum, you could, theoretically, have speeds of over 20 Gbps. In practice you are more likely to have a tenth of that, but still amazingly fast.

It’s the right solution in the right place.

To Ofcom that place is indoors. Band 258 licences are only currently available for internal use. The regulator envisages the key applications to be in factory automation.

As frequencies climb, the range drops, so milllimetre wave is of inherently short range. This can be mitigated with extra cells and proper radio planning.

Less solvable is the inability of this wavelength to penetrate walls.

But perhaps the biggest problem is device availability. The band was chosen as part of European harmonisation. Unfortunately, none of the major operators is using it. As a result, devices that support it are next to non-existent.

Millimetre wave is different in the US, because it’s 28GHz and there are devices that support it. Verizon runs 28GHz in the US and city centres that are drawn by the enormously fast speeds have the radios. In turn, some who live in these cities have the devices.

There is plenty of 28GHz kit like this, made by Sony for US bands, but hardly any for European 26GHz

rival phones have but that the supplying manufacturer does not. This consideration is also with an eye to the operator buyers. It will include features such as a camera with a smile sensor, an under-glass fingerprint reader or a better camera. It’s usually something that helps the sales process, such as radio performance, battery life or support for unregarded radio bands.

The third priority is the addition of features that will make the phone stand out against rivals. At last, we get to the area in which band 77 gets a bit of a look-in because enterprise customers are increasingly important and are pushing the demand for private 5G networks.

In recent years, all manufacturers have been dreadful at finding innovative new features for phones. They have played with reducing the bezel, improving the camera, or having a notch or a punch hole. The Motorola Razr and Samsung Flip apart, there has been precious little experimentation with form factor, so instead it’s a race to the bottom on price. That means there’s no desire to introduce new spectrum bands with the associated radio testing. So, while MediaTek and Qualcomm might have band 77 available on the chipset, this is unreliable information when trying to

NOT ALL BAND 77 IS CREATED EQUAL You would have thought that lack of operator interest in band 77 would have been reflected in radio hardware. While operators buy most of the handsets in the world, they buy all of the network infrastructure. After all, that’s the definition of an operator. Hanif’s vision that Japan would unlock devices for band 77 might not yet be realised, but there has been a significant benefit in infrastructure. Network infrastructure vendors have been making apparatus for that market for a while. There is a

determine if the phone will actually work in band 77, as it’s often not enabled in the operating system.

IT DEPENDS WHO YOU ARE Given all of this, it’s pretty miraculous that any mainstream phone supports band 77, but the most mainstream of all, the iPhone 12, does.

Sort of. Whether your iPhone will work in the band depends on who you are. The iPhone has operator profiles. This determines which features in the phone are switched on or off.

To ensure that your iPhone has support for the band, you’ll need to buy it from an operator that has specified it. Can you spot the problem with this?

shortage of available 5G radio equipment, but the need to support Japan means that there is some mainstream equipment – or almost.

Japan doesn’t use the whole of the 3.8 to 4.2GHz band; it uses 3.85 to 4.1GHz, so much of the existing equipment doesn’t cover the whole band. Some other manufacturers make equipment that runs from 400MHz to 4GHz, so again the top 200MHz is not catered for.

This needs to be borne in mind when applicants seek spectrum. The pricing is simple; it’s £80 per 10MHz per year. There is no cost difference between the rural, medium-power licence of 42dBm and the urban, lowpower licence of 24dBm. Ofcom reasons that shared-access spectrum

is for sharing, and therefore, by capping to 100 MHz the amount that any applicant can have, it’s possible for up to four organisations to licence in the same place. In reality this isn’t much of a limitation, as the radio heads are limited to 80MHz or 100MHz. Avoidance of interference between radio users is fundamental to the existence of Ofcom. It’s a credo that predates Ofcom, its ancestor Oftel and the Home Office before that.

It goes all the way back to the Wireless Telegraphy Acts of 1904 and 1949. So, it seems sensible that when organisations apply for band 77 spectrum, Ofcom chooses to allocate the higher parts of the frequency band.

This keeps the entrant away from the licensed

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There are some wrinkles: you don’t have to be an operator to get an iPhone profile, just a customer important enough to Apple for the company to get one written. This typically means you must buy several million dollars’ worth of handsets. But US operators such as Verizon are pushing the door for private 5G and eSIM, which is encouraging Apple and others to develop support.

For the majority of android handsets, the waters are similarly muddy. Support for band 77 depends on two things: what you mean by band 77, and what software is in the phone. To deal with the second one first, the software loaded onto a phone varies by region and by the local customers. Some parameters can be enabled by re-flashing the phone with the right release of the firmware. This is often available through a bit of web searching, but you need to know what you are doing. It’s easy to “brick”, or kill, the phone.

Understanding what you mean by band 77 is down to standalone or non-standalone. In brief, NSA, or non-standalone, means a version of 5G that uses a 4G network other than in the radio stage. SA, or standalone, is a buzz-word bingo of containerisation, http2 and Release 16. It promises a step change in the way

spectrum that is used by operators at just below 3.8GHz. For an applicant, however, there may be other considerations. If applying for multiple, overlapping licences, it may be sensible to have different parts of the spectrum for re-use. This is not the only option. It’s quite possible to have multiple sites on the same spectrum but split on the time domain.

An aligned concern is that it’s better to have the lower frequencies because the propagation is better. Whatever the driving reason, it’s important not to apply just for band 77, but to specify where within the band you’d like your chunk. Bear in mind that space has to be left for other users to co-habit, so odd, small chunks in the middle are a bit anti-social.

One great example of Ofcom’s flexibility is that it is open to organisations making multiple applications on a single spreadsheet. It’s preferred that you fill out one OfW589 form to accompany the spreadsheet, which gives details of all the equipment used.

A second form you might like to ask for is an exception form, which enables you to state a case for using the spectrum in a way that is not covered by the general rules – for example, to use medium power in an urban environment. Ofcom is always willing to listen.

Ofcom is keen to see shared-access licensing succeed. You should find that emails to spectrum. licensing@ofcom.org.uk are answered in a timely way.

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networks are built and delivered. The holy grail is a device that supports B77 SA, but for now you will probably have to speak to the handset manufacturer to get the software for that and then re-flash the phone.

Still, 5G isn’t just about handsets; there are many use cases with connected devices that don’t need mainstream phones. The liberation promise that Hanif made that day in Cambridge may not have come to fruition yet, but we are getting there, and band 77 is becoming a major part of the world’s mobile ecosystem.

Peter Gradwell

Chief Commercial Officer, Telet Telet is the UK’s fifth full mobile network operator.

It delivers neutral host, private 5G and 5G fixed wireless internet. Gradwell is a recognised communications entrepreneur whose business journey started in his Aberystwyth University flat, from where he became a leading enabler of voice over IP after he set up Gradwell Communications, which has provided telecoms to over 25,000 small UK-based businesses.

BAND 3 On the face of it, band 3 would seem to be the most attractive of the sharedaccess spectrum bands. The 1800MHz frequency is an anchor band. Pretty much all devices support it.

Band 3 was the launch band for One2One, which became T-Mobile and now is EE, and for Orange, also now EE. At the time, in 1994, there was concern that the new mobile technology would interfere with DECT, which was a standard spectrum for digital cordless phones at around 1900MHz. So, a gap was left between the top of the mobile and the bottom of the cordless spectra. This was

known as a guard band. Over time, it was found that Ofcom had been a little too cautious, the two technologies didn’t interfere and therefore some of that spectrum could be used.

The mobile operators each had 5.6MHz of bandwidth but there was 5MHz between the top of what they used and the bottom of the DECT frequency. It was decided that a 3.3MHz section between the two could be used.

In many ways, this was the first foray into shared-access licence spectrum. Ofcom sold ten licences for ten years at auction. Each successful bidder was told that they had to work with the others to avoid interference. None of the operators that bought these licences have done anything particularly exciting. One, Coffee Telecom, was acquired by Talk Talk; another is used by BT for its OnePhone service. BT bought

another of the operators and so had two licences for the same thing.

At the end of the ten years, the guard band morphed into shared-access licence spectrum. Anyone can apply to use it but the biggest challenge is finding equipment that supports 3.3MHz, as the minimum supported in most Qualcomm chips is 5MHz. The narrow spectrum also means that an internet connection will always be too slow for anything but the lightest of users. One person with a cell to themselves might see 6Mbps.

For 5G deployments, the value of band 3 is to have it running alongside other spectrum. Devices will latch onto band 3 and can then be re-directed to band 77 or where-ever. It’s also useful to run band 3 as 2G GSM and to use it to handle voice calls for devices that cannot carry voice over 4G or 5G.

A SEAMLESS TRANSITION TO 5G POWERED BY ARKESSA

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Intellectual Property and Open RAN To enable promising UK companies to participate in Open RAN and 5G, and for the innovation ecosystem to thrive, it is critical that the government immediately ensures that licences to standards-essential patents are granted by patent holders to any company that wants a licence, without threats of injunctions, and on transparent, fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

T

O HELP OPEN R A N

succeed, we need to tread a path between incentivising companies to develop innovative new technologies, rewarding them for their work, and opening the market to allow it to grow.

This is not a new problem in the mobile industry, or indeed in many regulated industries. Companies that participate in the standards-setting process commit to the licensing of their patents through a process known as FRAND, or fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory licensing. This ensures that standards-essential patents, or SEPs, are available to competing companies and to any company that wants a licence.

The 5G standard is defined by the industry standards-setting organisation the European Standards Telecommunications Institute, known as ETSI. Industry representatives and other interested parties meet at 3GPP working groups to discuss the technological solutions that should be incorporated into a particular standard. During that process, representatives may propose to include certain technologies in the standard. The proposed technology may be covered by a patent or pending patent application that is held by the representative’s company. It’s a heavily academic process that is intended to find the best possible solutions; but some representatives have vested interests. They lobby for ETSI to choose options that may or may not be optimal, but which use their patents. If the proposed technology is adopted into the standard and it is covered by a patent, that patent is said to be “essential” to the use of the standard.

The owner of that SEP can require all

companies that make or sell products that meet the standard to take out licences. This dynamic gives the owner of an SEP significant monopoly leverage over a potential licensee, as the patent owner can threaten to obtain an injunction to prevent the sale of any product that uses the standard if the licensee does not agree to the owner’s terms. To avoid unfair exploitation of this leverage by an SEP owner to demand excessive royalties or to exclude standards-compliant products, many standards-setting organisations, including 3GPP, require the owners of such patents to commit to license it on FRAND terms to third parties. This FRAND commitment is supposed to eliminate the chance for horizontal competitors to agree unlawfully on a single standardised set of technical solutions, rather than competing.

Standards-setting organisations, however, do not have the resources to check whether

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SEPs declared to be essential to a standard are actually essential (or whether they are valid and otherwise enforceable; indeed, only a court could make authoritative determinations on these points). Nor do standards-setters take steps to require companies to comply with their intellectual property rights policy.

NOT NECESSARILY NEEDED Many SEPs have been declared “essential” that are not. According to a variety of evidentiary studies, between 70 and 90 per cent of SEPs have been found to be non-essential, invalid, or not infringed when they have been tested in court.

Open RAN may create opportunities for UK companies to participate in the development of 5G, but that can only happen if SEPs are available to be licensed on FRAND terms to any company in the supply chain that wants a licence.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

SHUTTERSTOCK

Some SEP holders, however, refuse to grant SEP licences to certain companies in the supply chain. Thus, they are discriminating against those companies and industries and engaging in conduct that is contrary to the FRAND commitment they made voluntarily to 3GPP as a condition of inclusion of their patented technology in the 5G standard.

Unless this issue is addressed urgently, SEP holders may refuse to license their SEPs to companies that are developing products and services for use in the Open RAN industry.

The 5G Diversification Strategy Report observes that, following the government’s decision to exclude Huawei from the UK’s 5G networks by 2027, two companies – Nokia and Ericsson – dominate the 5G equipment supply chain and they exercise great influence over single sign-ons (SSOs) that enables them to set an SSO “technological roadmap in line with their own R&D priorities and product development” (section 2.13). Influence over standards development enables incumbents to fortify their SEP positions, which pushes up other companies’ costs of supplying 5G network equipment as they must pay higher licence fees to the incumbents.

THREAT TO INNOVATION The duopoly of Nokia and Ericsson not only dominates the network supply chain, but these companies also hold large SEP portfolios (Nokia currently has nine per cent and Ericsson has four per cent of 5G SEPs). Huawei has 15 per cent of 5G SEPs (see https://www.iammedia.com/who-leading-the-5g-patent-racepatent-landscape-analysis-declared-seps-andstandards-contributions).

Nokia and Ericsson are part of a consortium of companies that are refusing to grant SEP licences to suppliers of components for the car industry, so they may do the same for Open RAN and 5G. Meanwhile, imagine what Huawei management might think about whether or not to grant SEP licences to companies that are going to be competing in the UK infrastructure market from which it has been ejected; it is already suing Verizon (a US network operator) for SEP infringement in networks.

If any of these companies (or other SEP holders) refuse to grant licences for SEPs, or charge excessive licensing fees, then that might be the end of the government’s 5G diversification strategy and of Open RAN in the UK and elsewhere!

A key thrust of the government’s strategy is to allow innovative UK companies to bring new

products and services to market.

Ensuring that any UK company that wants to license an SEP is permitted to obtain one is critical to enabling companies to innovate and become leaders in their fields. SEP holders that refuse to issue licences are discriminating against such companies and harming innovation.

Because tens of thousands of patents are declared to be essential to 5G standards (in part due to over-declaration), it is prohibitively costly for new entrants, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, to navigate the thicket of declared SEPs. They may be faced with countless demands for significant royalties, with little ability to determine whether the patents asserted against them are actually SEPs or what the FRAND royalty rates should be. Therefore, there must be transparency regarding what rates are being charged for SEPs in Open RAN and 5G. SEP holders should not threaten or seek injunctions to pressure companies to pay nonFRAND royalties for use of such SEPs, and companies should not be forced to pay for global portfolios of patents as a condition of making their innovative products available in the UK market.

The UK government is aware of some of these issues. In the second 2021 report of the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, which related to 5G market diversification and wider lessons for critical and emerging technologies, the committee identified intellectual property rights as an issue: 15. The Government identified the concentration of intellectual property rights in the hands of established vendors as a barrier to market entry. It commits in its diversification strategy to working with industry bodies to address this, although the proposed work is not described in great detail.

In its response to this Report, the Government should provide more details on how it intends to address the barriers brought about by intellectual property rights, and update us on early progress made against this goal.

(Paragraph 60 of the HC Select Committee Report) The UK government response in March 2021 was as follows: Intellectual property rights, and in particular Standard Essential Patents, play a key role in the design and development of telecoms

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radio equipment. As set out in the Diversification Strategy, in the context of 5G the commercial behaviour around both intellectual property rights and standard essential patents represents a potentially significant barrier to diversification.

This was also noted by the Diversification Taskforce, which highlighted in its final report that the consolidation of intellectual property rights and standard essential patents among market leading suppliers has “the potential to serve as considerable barriers to diversification as technology suppliers staunchly protect their investment and designs”.

The government’s view is that appropriate measures need to be considered to reduce these potential barriers to ensure that revenue from intellectual property rights is fair for suppliers and users of intellectual property rights: greater transparency in their essentiality and pricing could be beneficial for both licensees and licensors.

The Government is considering options for monitoring the essentiality of patents and considering how to approach this issue, including in discussions with international partners and with industry.

There is an urgent need for a governmentfunded organisation to monitor the challenges posed by SEPs. This should include ensuring that a database is set up to store all the 5G RAN SEPs, along with links to each patent, contact details of the licence holder and the FRAND terms under which it is licensed.

In order to create a diverse supply chain, all companies that want licences for SEPs must be able to obtain them on FRAND terms, and there should be a public price-list for FRANDs. The FRAND system can be made to work well, but for Open RAN it is going to need urgent help.

Robert Pocknell Lawyer

Robert Pocknell is a Director at N&M Consultancy, a UK company that advises on the licensing of standards-essential patents. Pocknell is also chairman of the Fair Standards Alliance (www.fair-standards.org), which is a group of small, medium-sized and large companies in many 5G and IoT industries that want to see FRAND licensing made available to all companies in the supply chain.

Mapping the way We are just starting the 5G journey; Robert Driver is programming the technology satnav.

TOP

10

More projects are exploring applications outside, but some are doing both inside and outside

ENGINEERING FOCUS

16

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES

17

18

MEC

IoT

14

14

14

Shared Access

AR/VR 12

13

Backhaul - 5G New fibre Radio NSA 12

12

Test/dev licence

IoT 24

14

11

INSIDE THESE WERE THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT PROJECTS SAID WERE THEIR HIGHEST PRIORITY, AND SHOW HOW MANY PROJECTS GAVE THE CATEGORY A MAXIMUM SCORE OF EITHER 9 OR 10 POINTS.

83

3

70

%

57

%

27

7

12

The majority of projects (90%) are using fibre for backhaul. Only 7 are using microwave mesh, and 12 microwave point to point.

9 projects (30%) are using satellite backhaul - and 3 have identified this as a high priority

17 projects (57%) identify eMBB as their highest priority

3

In all 24 projects are deploying IoT or sensor arrays, and for 14 this is a high P R O J E C T S priority focus.

More than half of the projects are investigating cellular IoT deployments (NB-IoT or LTE-M) - for two projects this is a high priority. 3 projects are deploying LoRA sensors and 1 project is looking at Sigfox

8

SPECTRUM LICENCES

19

Local Licence

Licensed Mobile Spectrum

17

16

C O R E

While 23 projects are exploring network slicing, this is only a high priority for 4 projects. 12 projects are exploring local roaming, and this is a strong focus for 4.

60% of the projects are using mobile network operator core networks. A higher proportion (80%) are using a private network core, and for 18 projects this is the highest priority.

PROJECTS

18

4

3 projects have identified OSS/BSS as a high priority.

24

PROJECTS

4

state that they are investigating Open RAN or MultiOperator RAN and for 6 of the projects this is the highest priority.

Fixed Wireless Access Small Cell Deployment

90% of the projects are deploying stand-alone 5G new radio.

63% of the projects (19) are investigating fixed wireless access - again, for 4 of the projects this is the highest priority.

More projects are deploying small cells (83%) than are utilising macro cells (60%) - some projects are, of course, utilising both.

18 projects are looking at Asset tracking, and for 7 this is a high priority

PROJECTS

Other network applications range

As one would expect all projects are focusing on telecom innovation, with 20 projects covering neutral host applications (and for 6 of the projects, this is their highest priority).

from orchestration to carrier

80% of the projects are looking at AR/VR applications and this is the highest priority for 12 projects, not all of them, of course, in the Entertainment and Media segments.

IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES 80%

24 12

aggregation.

E N T E R TA I N M E N T AND MEDIA A P P L I CAT I O N S

16

6

PROJECTS

16 projects are deploying entertainment and streaming platforms in their core (it is a high priority for 6 projects). Engineering applications in this sector range from FeMBMS enhanced video services for live events to audio over IP applications.

PROJECTS

16 projects are looking at process control applications with 3 projects stating this is their highest priority; business models such as machine time as a service are being investigated in 1 project.

4

PONGO AND MATELOT

While 8 projects are exploring dynamic access spectrum, only 1 project is prioritising this [5G New Thinking]. 3 projects have identified mmWave spectrum as a high priority.

None of the projects are prioritising TV white space.

SA New Radio

21 projects have an IoT platform in their Core - and for 8 projects this is a high priority.

16

3

25

19

6

I N D U S T R I A L A P P L I C AT I O N

NETWORK

9

27

7

PROJECTS

PROJECTS

R A DIO ACCE S S

4

20

17 projects state that they are exploring artificial intelligence and for 5 this is a high priority.

T E L E C O M I N N O VAT I O N

14

PROJECTS

Only half of the projects are utilising licensed mobile spectrum. A higher proportion are using a shared access licence (19 projects) and 16 a local licence. 20 projects are making use of a test & development licence issued

by Ofcom. Of course some projects are using a variety of licences.

5

PROJECTS

INTERNET OF THINGS

BAC K H AU L

mMTC

17

Fibre

uRLLC

Microwave Mesh

83% of all the projects focus on enhanced mobile broadband [eMBB], 70% on low latency [uRLLC] and 57% on mMTC. Surprisingly 14 projects are focusing on the location services enabled through Rel.16.

Microwave Point to Point

5 G S P EC I F I C AT I O N

eMBB

17

There are a wide range of applications.

93% of the projects are focusing on 5G security, and for 9 this is the highest development priority.

28 9

OUTSIDE 5G New Radio SA

eMBB

Sharred Access

hullaballoo around 5G on the major mobile networks, it can be challenging for consumers and business owners to understand that we are still in the foothills of the 5G journey.

UK5G’s remit is to help UK industry to benefit from 5G technology by fostering an engaged and informed ecosystem.

Although there have been some announcements about standalone 5G in some specific places, most installed 5G public networks are non-standalone. Indeed, people forget that 2021 was the first year in which the full standard was expected to be rolled out in much of the world.

It is also easy to forget that some of the key 5G specifications in the 3GPP standards have only just been finalised (for example, ultra-reliable low-latency communication, or uRLLC, in release 16) and that, as a rule of thumb, the earliest commercial deployment is released two years after specifications are frozen. Low latency is so important for many industrial or creative industry applications.

The RedCap standard in release 17 won’t be frozen until 2022. This “reduced capability” standard will be important for those wanting to deploy less complex, newradio devices for higher end internet-ofthings applications offering much faster data transmission speeds than currently available. This will be vital for many private network deployments that don’t need the overheads and complexity that are so essential for the public networks. Many verticals have no experience of deploying wireless technologies, so a simplified approach will be important.

So different 5G architectures have different benefits and capabilities, and this is where the programme of trials in the UK has been so striking. In the last issue we showed the wide geographical spread and range of industrial sectors that are covered by the DCMS-supported trials. In this issue we profile the range of technologies that are

THESE GRAPHICS ARE DRAWN FROM DATA PROVIDED BY 30x DCMS-SUPPORTED 5G PROJECTS

Private Network Core

T&D Licence

W

ITH ALL THE

For 4 projects, predictive maintenance is of the highest priority.

10 projects state they are exploring vehicle automation, and in addition, realtime remote control and teleoperation applications are being investigated in specific projects.

PROJECTS

AU T O M AT I O N

covered by the trials (see pages 35 to 37).

Thirty of the DCMS-supported 5G trials have reported on their technology priorities.

Each project completed a detailed survey, and then had the opportunity to validate their return after comparison with everyone else.

We are grateful for the effort the project teams spent on this exercise. The project organisers told us which aspect of the 5G specification they were focusing on, the kind of spectrum licence they were using, aspects of their radio access network, whether their application was indoors or outdoors, technical subjects such as backhaul and aspects of the core they were deploying, and finally the engineering or application foci of their project. The survey asked multiple, detailed questions in eight main categories.

We asked all the projects to prioritise against these categories from one to ten. A mark of nine or ten indicated the highest priority.

The results, illustrated in the infographics, show a set of projects that are exploring the boundaries of the technology, ready for when it becomes widely available in the market. In most cases, of course, the projects are not just tackling use cases, but validating business cases as well.

There is still a real gap in understanding between the vertical sectors or enterprises, the demand side, and the telecom industry supply side, which is habituated to servicing the mass consumer, mobile broadband market. There’s still an enormous education and engagement job to do here, to help vertical sectors to understand and adopt 5G as it moves from tech-evangelism and trials to real-world deployments.

We need to answer three, ostensibly

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simple, questions for these industries: What can 5G do for my company? How much will it cost us? How (and when) do we get it?

In conjunction with DCMS colleagues, a big UK5G focus for the remainder of this year will be on a series of marketing campaigns aimed at specific industries, working with industry leaders and intermediaries, to try to answer these questions.

We will be tailoring use cases and case studies, curating events and activities, transforming our on-line presence, and working with the supply side through the UK5G supplier directory. This will include introducing visualisations of the directory that highlight those suppliers that wish to work with specific sectors. Translating the emerging lessons from the DCMS-supported trials will be an important aspect of the campaigns.

Above all, we want the content that is created to be understandable and, as much as possible, not to utilise the complex language of the wireless engineer.

Of course, 5G technology applies to every sector of the economy, so we have had to make some hard choices. Working with the DCMS and following some analysis, we have decided to prioritise four main sectors: creative industries; manufacturing; health & social care; and transport & logistics.

Work is ongoing, led by our marketing team, and will start to become public-facing in the coming weeks.

Robert Driver Head of UK5G

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