UK5G. Issue 8

Innovation Briefing

ISSUE 8

DELIVERED BY

PROTECTING THE UK FROM GLOBAL THREATS

#BeB-

BREAKING THE SUPPLY CHAIN IMPASSE #BeBetterConnected

FROM FOUR MOBILE NETWORKS TO THOUSANDS. HOW 5G SHAPES THE FUTURE

Imagine climate action with exponential impact.

With technology and global collaboration, it’s Possible.

Ericsson is creating a world of limitless connectivity, where mobile technology opens new possibilities to pioneer a sustainable future. ericsson.com/imaginepossible

UK5G INNOVATION BRIEFING

Innovation Briefing

ISSUE 8

DELIVERED BY

PROTECTING THE UK FROM GLOBAL THREATS THE BEST OF BRITISH: UK COMPANIES BUILDING 5G EQUIPMENT & SOFTWARE

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#BeB-

BREAKING THE SUPPLY CHAIN IMPASSE #BeBetterConnected

FROM FOUR MOBILE NETWORKS TO THOUSANDS. HOW 5G SHAPES THE FUTURE UK5G8_01_Cover v04_MI.indd 1

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

FUTURE RAN COMPETITION

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NEWS Standalone is the tech of the future. Device security is a worry. Amazon starts CBRS biz and more Sonic funds.

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

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

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CW, Bradfield Centre, 184 Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge CB4 0GA

DCMS is looking to stimulate British production of mobile network apparatus. A £36m fund has done that with the FRANC programme welcoming 15 consortia and 60 companies to kickstart an ecosystem that promises great innovations in equipment design.

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Your easy reference guide24to the 50 23 projects running in the Testbeds and Trials programme, FRANC, SONIC, WM5G, they include28Urban testbeds, Rural projects, Industrial & manufacturing, Health & social Care. Creative media & sport. Ports & logistics, and Supply chain diversification.

Replacing visits with virtual pharmacists, Liverpool’s PANMAN has improved lives and reduced and reduced costs. costs.

Consulting Editor Andrew Orlowski andrew@cwjp.co.uk Creative Director Matthew Inman Business Development Director Roger Hinkson roger@cwjp.co.uk Finance Director Delia Robinson Photography Stuart Berman Special Projects Alex Young

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GLOBAL THREATS

GO FIFTH AND MULTIPLY

Huawei fears have been addressed but the chip shortage continues while, Russian, North Korean and state-supported hackers pose an ongoing problem.

Once there were only four networks. Now there are thousands.

What was true for Television foretells the future for mobile. Falling technology costs and liberalisation of spectrum has opened the way for a confederation of open private networks. These fill in unprofitable not spots and provide special services tailored to vertical markets. Catherine Gull tunes in.

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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Ericsson, as a chartered engineer specialising in network design and optimisation. A proper, and rewarding, engineering job. Solving engineering problems is what makes me tick, so when I was approached to run the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme I jumped at the chance. The DCMS role was an opportunity to work in something different; funding incredibly bright people to experiment with 5G use cases. A £200m programme to build a 5G ecosystem.

Heading up the programme is a little like being a headmaster. I think of each of the projects as pupils. Individuals with skills and aspirations.

I’ve enjoyed watching them grow and mature, overcoming difficulties and turning ambitions into deployments. We’ve had many firsts within the projects and the achievements and awards they have made and received gives me a great sense of pride.

We are now coming to the end of term. The UK’s 5G showcase we are holding in Birmingham on March 22nd and 23rd will see the results of the projects demonstrated and, pandemic allowing of course, be a chance to meet and celebrate what we’ve achieved.

Like any good teacher we’ve learned a lot from the projects. They have influenced spectrum policy and we’ve seen lessons learned in the earlier ones benefit later ones. This has always been a research and development scheme so it’s no surprise that many have ended in a different place to where they started.

But the greatest thing we’ve learned is the need for more choice in infrastructure, particularly Open RAN apparatus. And that’s where this year’s new intake comes in. Wearing my proud headmaster mortarboard, I’m beaming at the calibre of the teams behind FRANC. We were bowled over by the number and quality of the applications.

There are impressive names there: Three of the four UK mobile operators, ARM, Amazon, Toshiba, Thales, eight universities and significant overseas contributors adding to the funding from DCMS. That’s just the winners. The projects which have been funded represents fewer than half the applicants. I’d like to thank the team at DCMS, and our external advisors who marked the entrance exams.

Next term is going to be very exciting. I am also keen to those who were unsuccessful to keep going and continue to contribute to the UK Telecoms agenda.

Now however it’s time for me to pick up the spanners again. I am moving on to become the CTO of a rapidly growing company rolling out fibre and 5G to underserved rural areas.

I’ll be sorry to leave the fantastic people I’ve worked with over the last four years, and extremely proud of our achievements. We have built a 5G ecosystem, and I look forward to taking my place within it.

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5PRING The first ever corporate wireless email system was at British Leyland in Coventry. This heritage is reflected in 5prinG, pronounounced “Spring” the West Midland 5G incubator programme is teaching dozens of companies about using communications to grow their businesses in construction, transport, manufacturing and health.

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THE 6G FUTURE

Terahertz frequencies, Terabits speeds, free optical space transmission and new encoding technologies. Academics are always a step ahead. Some of the smartest people in mobile look at what the future has to offer. The standards are up for grabs and the battle lines are being drawn up. But what will we use it for?

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VERTICAL CAMPAIGNS

JOINED UP

Vicki DeBlasi looks at the work UK5G is doing to promote the benefits of 5G to Transport, Health and Social Care

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Working together is not always something that can be phoned in. Prepandemic there were weekly events. The UK’s 5G Trials International Showcase will be an opportunity to meet

Ian Smith

5G Testbeds and Trials Programme Director, DCMS

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

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TURN OFF 2G

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HE UK’S 2G AND 3G networks will be turned off by 2033 at the latest, 41 years after the first GSM phone call was made. The big four mobile networking operators have promised to abide by the timetable set DCMS, although the Government lacks the power to compel them to do so.

The policy follows the recommendation made by the Telecoms Diversification Taskforce for stakeholders to agree on a sunset date. “The phasing out of these older services has been completed or in process in a number of other countries (eg, Australia, Canada, USA, Japan, South Korea),” the Taskforce noted. The US expects to complete to shut down 3G by 2023.

2033 is later than many would have predicted just a few years ago. For example, mobile industry expert and entrepreneur Nick Hunn told Parliament in 2016 that 2G “is scheduled to be turned off by 2026 at the latest, with others putting the date earlier”.

2020 was even touted, but a lot can happen in four years.

Switching off 2G and 3G will allow the spectrum to be “refarmed”, and put to use by more modern 4G and 5G networks.

Very few consumer mobile phones, aside from those with big buttons sold to older users, still use 2G or 3G, but issues arise with emergency services, and embedded and industrial equipment. Alarms systems and security cameras will need to be replaced, and while the eCall safety system for cars was optimised for 2G and 3G. New cars old sold in the EU since April 2018 must be fitted with eCall. A VoLTE (4G) version was only agreed three years ago. However, the biggest challenge of all in the UK will be with domestic smart meters. Second-generation (SMETS2) smart meters use 2G and 3G. While the communication component is a discrete module, these will still require an upgrade.

Earlier this year, Mike Hewitt, CTO of Capita-owned DCC, which operates the network used by smart meters to talk to energy companies, explained that, “4G has only reached a reasonable level of national coverage in 2020 and 5G will only have the required level of coverage towards 2030. It also has challenges with penetration into the parts of homes required for meter connectivity.”

The Taskforce noted that prolonging 2G was an obstacle to the policy goal of increasing supply chain diversity.

“The UK environment poses particular challenges to new vendors due to the ongoing requirement for and support of 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G networks,” the TaskForce concluded.

“This imposes additional complexity on vendors considering entry to the UK marketplace and some neither have nor wish to develop solutions for technologies that are being phased out elsewhere.”

As a result, the switch off target is enmeshed in wider efforts to diversify the mobile telecoms equipment marketplace, and accelerate the adoption of OpenRAN standards.

“Joint activity will include investment in the research and development, deployment, and

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Comedian Ernie Wise launched Vodafone’s 1G network with a call from London’s St Katharine Docks to Vodafone HQ on 1st January 1985

adoption of open network technologies, creating the right market environment to foster and encourage innovation, and international partnerships that bring together learning from across the global supply chain,” DCMS explained in its announcement. £250 million has been committed to accelerate the adoption of the OpenRAN market in the UK. The R&D competition FRANC [see page 12] is an example.

The Government stated in the same announcement the target of 35 per cent of mobile traffic to be carried on OpenRAN equipment by 2030.

The Government rejected a Lord’s amendment to report on the progress of the diversification strategy to Parliament. “We have not yet committed to a specific way of reporting progress, as policy work is at an early stage and the criteria for how we measure its success is evolving in line with our policy,” Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, and the Parliament Under Secretary of State (Minister for Arts) told the House of Lords told in the Telecommunications (Security) Bill in November.

NEWS

AMAZON’S NETWORK IN A BOX

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dramatic entry into the fastgrowing private 5G network business. Amazon Web Services announced its AWS Private 5G offering on November 30th, promising to reduce much of the time and complexity for a business looking to create a 5G network for its customers and partners.

“With just a few clicks in the AWS console, customers specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices, and AWS delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and SIM cards required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices,” Amazon says.

Amazon argues that the complexity of integration, which often means outsourcing and co-ordinating multiple vendors, is a barrier that is deterring many enterprises from operating a private network.

AWS cites industrial and manufacturing use cases, sports venues and health care in its list of use cases, but the most interesting business innovation is in the pricing. Customers pay only for the bandwidth they use, rather than a perdevice fee. This means a business will be able to scale up or down rapidly between tiers.

AWS Private 5G is only available for trial so far in the US, where the network will use the shared spectrum service, Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which opens the 3.55 Ghz to 3.7

Ghz band to all.

Although Amazon is keen to use equivalents in other countries, no service outside the US has yet been announced. Ofcom made shared spectrum in four bands available in 2019, although one of these is for indoor use only.

These aren’t suitable for macro (wide area) networks, but could be very useful for enterprises which know where they do business, such as their own factories and offices. By September 2021, 71 low power licensees had been issued to 23 licensees, and 192 medium power licenses to 13 licensees.

Growth is extremely rapid in this market.

More than half of the organisations surveyed by NTT late last year (51 per cent) said they planned to deploy a private network within the next two years, while almost a quarter had already done so. Over 80 per cent surveyed agreed that the pandemic had made obtaining a budget for a private network easier, and Amazon’s flexible pricing model may make that an even easier sell. Over a third of organisations surveyed currently prefer to use a managed service provider (MSP) model for the private network.

At least three out of four new private networks in 2022 will be 5G, up from 31 per cent at the end of 2020, estimates Analysis Mason in its end of year predictions.

To find out more see https://aws.amazon. com/private5g/

STANDALONE SPIKE

DAN NELSON / UNSPLASH.COM

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expenditure in standalone 5G networks, as operators upgrade to the latest and more capable equipment.

So far, 5G networks added so far are ‘non standalone’, an incremental upgrade to 4G adding NR (new radio) capabilities. 2022 will be the start of a period in which a cumulative $990 billion will be allocated to 5G investments, or around 65 per cent of total capital expenditure by mobile operators.

Labelling nonstandalone 5G networks as 5G has led to criticism, particularly in the United States, where independent consumer testing suggests that devices attach to a 5G network just 16.4 per cent of the time on AT&T, and 9.7 per cent of the time Verizon – both national networks. The official GSMA rules allow a handset to show a 5G icon if a network is available even if 4G is being used.

The analyst company made the prediction in its final quarterly bulletin of 2021. It also anticipates the supply chain squeeze to continue inhibiting demand into 2022. Analysys Mason calculates that 105 million fewer 5G handsets have been sold than might have been expected. It isn’t just components.

Long delays in fulfilling Apple iPhone 13 orders were caused by outbreaks of coronavirus in Vietnam, where the devices are assembled. This has led to consumers sticking to their and spending their money on other purchases. Apple said it had cut its iPhone 13 production goal by 10 million units.

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LOCK UP THAT PHONE

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consumer devices embeds basic security into the product, and the Government is introducing new legislation to make sure they do. The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) Bill was introduced on November 25th, and sets standards for ‘consumer connectable products’. It encompasses products such as smartphones, connected cameras, wearables and fitness trackers, smart home assistants like the Alexa speaker, and home automation and alarm systems.

The law follows an IoT security consultation by DCMS in 2019. The department worked closely with the National Cyber Security Centre, security experts and standards bodies such as ETSI to create the legislation.

ETSI, which had already created specifications for an IoT security standard, published a companion specification for securing smartphones on the same day.

The ETSI specification TS 103 732 (see www.bit.ly/3FbojCy) addresses hardware, operating system software, and preinstalled system applications. Within those parameters, it covers a broad range of security features including cryptographic support, user data protection, identification and authentication, security management, privacy protection, resistance to physical attack, secure boot, and trusted communication channels. It identifies key assets of consumer mobile devices to be protected and identifies the threats associated to them and the functional capabilities that are required to mitigate those threats.

5G IN THE SKY

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B R I T I S H company has developed a unique radio solution to put 5G in the sky, using pilotless drones powered by ‘green hydrogen’ to wipe out rural notspots.

Stratospheric Platforms Ltd is backed by Deutsche Telekom and led by the former CEO of the NATS air traffic control operation and a member of the UK government’s drone industry group, Richard Deakin.

The idea isn’t new - it’s one example instance of a high altitude platforms (HAP) which has

been tried before by companies including Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, but without success.

But the radio technology is new. The company has developed a unique 3m by 3m rotating antennas which once fitted to a drone could provide 5G connectivity for an area of 140 square kilometers (54 square miles). The antenna is composed of 2,000 parts providing beam forming, shaping and directing the signals to a specific area. “One aircraft could provide the M25 with coverage with a beam the shape of the M25,” Stratospheric Platforms

Ltd’s CEO Richard Deakin told the BBC. Implementation will require changes to licencing which currently forbids flying base stations.

Deakin is the former CEO of the NATS air traffic control operation and a member of the UK government’s drone industry group.

Deutsche Telekom has invested £70m in the company.

The drones fly at 60,000 feet, twice the height of commercial air traffic, and can stay airborne for nine days before returning to refuel.

In an added twist, the drones can now be powered by ‘green hydrogen’, generated from surplus renewable energy. The hydrogen prototype will make its maiden flight later this year.

Unlike satellites, HAPs don’t require an intermediary technology such as a satellite base station to get connectivity. But the track record to date has been sketchy. Facebook abandoned its own solar powered drones project in 2018, and Alphabet liquidated its stratospheric balloon venture Project Loon after a decade of research in 2021. Loon absorbed $100 million of investment and was once named by Google founder and CEO Larry Page as his favourite Google ‘moonshot’. But the Loon engineers found it difficult to control the free floating balloons once they were in the stratosphere, however, where winds can reach speeds of 155 mph and change direction suddenly.

“Another great British invention, I fear, threatening to head off overseas,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner in April.

For more information see www.stratosphericplatforms.com

DIVERSIONARY TACTICS

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are being established around some US airports after a stand off between the US air industry regulator, the Federal Aviation Authority, and the two leading US mobile networks.

The FAA has safety concerns over equipment in the 5G C-Band, at 3.7 GHz to 3.98 GHz interfering with radio altimeters on aircraft.

the pilot of a landing aircraft who can’t see the ground because of poor conditions, not to use the aircraft’s altimeter, and require them to find another place to land.

“These limitations could prevent dispatch of flights to certain locations with low visibility, and could also result in flight diversions,” the FAA explains.

The C-Band and the altimeters don’t use the same portion of the

The C-Band was auctioned last year but has seen no deployments yet. The telecoms regulator the Federal Communications Commission has found no interference issues, and the networks have offered to lower the power of base stations near airports to allay concerns. But that didn’t stop the FAA issuing two mandatory advisories in December, which came into effect immediately. These order

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spectrum, but they are closely adjacent, separated by 220Mhz from the 5G radio traffic. The stand off requires one of the two warring agencies to give way. While the FCC has found no evidence of altimeter interference from 5G, the FAA says it has no proof 5G will not affect the altimeters.

In the UK, the Shared Access Spectrum N77 band runs from 3.8 GHz to 4.2GHz.

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I’m delighted to continue our work supporting companies testing and integrating Open Ran products.

JOE BUTLER

SONIC GETS £15M POWER UP

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chain is a top priority for DCMS which has announced a cash injection of up to £15 million for SONIC Labs. This will help test equipment that might be used to meet an ambition for 35 per cent of the UK’s mobile network traffic to be carried over Open RAN by 2030. The labs at Ofcom and the Digital Catapult in London form a prototype testing facility for next-generation telecoms tech.

Run by Digital Catapult with support from Ofcom, the SONIC Labs programme enables telecoms suppliers to integrate early-stage products into working end-to-end systems tested in lab and real-world mobile network settings.

SONIC Labs opened in June 2021 with an investment of £1 million. The extra £15 million will be invested so the Lab can expand its programme of testing and international engagement.

Joe Butler, CTO, Digital Catapult said: “Diversification and interoperability are key

themes driving UK capabilities in advanced digital technology and we are pleased to expand Sonic Labs’ role in delivering fast, secure and reliable connectivity. We look forward to expanding access to our testbed network to companies looking to experiment with and test new products and services.”

The boost for the labs was announced alongside Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries, while meeting US Secretary for Commerce Gina Raimondo at the end of last year.

Dorries§ said: “5G technology is already revolutionising people’s lives and businesses - connecting people across the UK with faster mobile data and making businesses more productive. We can only do this through stronger international collaboration” The Secrtary of State also met with Director of the White House Office for Science and Tech Policy, Dr Eric Lander to discuss strengthening ambitions for the US-UK Technology Partnership which aims to foster collaboration on shared challenges across a range of issues including online safety, data and digital competition.

5PRING TEAMS UP WITH F1

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of motorsport, Formula 1® to explore the potential of 5G to revolutionise the events of the future. Formula 1 will work alongside Digital Catapult and a cohort of small and medium-sized enterprises to jointly explore 5G solutions to events industry challenges, as part of 5PRING: the UK’s first 5G commercial application accelerator. Formula 1 looking at ways to enhance event experiences for fans, making viewing experience more inclusive and interactive for audiences whether onsite and home - through the use of 5G and innovative technologies.

To find out more about 5prinG see page 20 of this issue

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NEWS IN BRIEF BRINGING SKILLS BACK HOME Vodafone has vowed to hire 7,000 new software engineers as it builds out its 5G services platform. They’ll be under the Vodafone Technology umbrella, across the UK and Europe. “Expanding software capabilities will allow Vodafone to build differentiated products and services at lower cost and own the intellectual property (IP) rather than sourcing them through suppliers,” the company said.

Vodafone is also committed to cutting the time to create and launch new products and services by half, thanks to a new common API, and a single global services catalogue.

H A L F W AY T H E R E ?

At least half of 5G’s chicken and egg problem may have been resolved. 60 per cent of new smartphones sold in the US are now capable of 5G, according to Simon Baker, co-ordinator of IDC global forecasting for the analyst company. In value rather than unit terms, 5G now represents two thirds of the market, and for Apple, some 85 per cent of new units shipped. All of Apple’s new models have been capable of 5G since the iPhone 12 in September 2020. Significantly, Chinese handset sales account for 46 per cent of the global 5G market, down from 87 per cent a year ago. Network rollout is lagging, however. OpenSignal found that consumers with both 5G smartphones and 5G plans are spending less than 10 per cent of their time connected to 5G, and it was only available in under a quarter of the locations they visited. T-Mobile gives the best average download speeds, availability and reach, according to OpenSignal. See www.opensignal.com/reports/2021/10/ usa/mobile-network-experience-5g

PLACE HUB DCMS has launched a new resource aggregating helpful material for local and regional authorities who want to know more about 5G. The Place Hub is the fifth of its kind https://uk5g.org/discover/ places/ “We know from speaking to organisations that 5G can seem complex and intimidating; this work is looking to address that,” says UK5G’s Vicki DeBlasi.

More on the vertical campaigns to promote 5G adoption on page 55.

Pioneering a sustainable future with limitless connectivity Ericsson examines the crucial role of 5G and connectivity in the UK and Europe’s net zero journey

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he global Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the new ways in which we live and connect with each other. It is now clear that we are living through a time of profound global technological and sociological change, while also confronting another defining issue of our time: the climate emergency.

Although these issues are complex, there is reason for optimism. The solutions required to overcome some of these defining issues of our time present vast possibilities for our world too. But for this to work, both the public and private sector must show that they will drive forward, together, a shared purpose of limiting global warming to 1.5°C or less.

For the 140 years of its existence and its 120 years in the UK, Ericsson has always had a purpose: to connect people. But with immediate action required now to safeguard the planet for future generations, it is committed to ensuring that this global connectivity is a force for good. Ericsson believes that a more connected future is a more sustainable and resilient future.

COP26 was a pivotal moment for businesses and governments across the globe to confront their responsibilities to safeguard the planet from excessive temperature rises. It is now clear that to limit temperature rises to 1.5°C by the end of the century, the ambitions set out at the conference will need to be followed by action in quick step.

Connectivity, innovation and the role of 5G As a global technology leader, Ericsson understands the role that innovation must play to transform the economies which support the aspirations of a growing population of almost 8 billion people.

There is an urgent need to find a more sustainable equilibrium for the planet. But given the pressing nature of the climate emergency, breakthrough innovations that will take time to materialise cannot be the only route forward. Instead, the focus must be on the tools and solutions that can be deployed at scale today to make a measurable impact.

When it comes to 5G there is no need to imagine what is possible. The digitisation of economies, and the transformation of traditional industries through the application of 5G already promises enormous energy efficiency gains and carbon savings. Put simply, more 5G connectivity is fundamental to the UK and Europe achieving their climate targets.

Ericsson’s recent Connectivity and Climate Change report found that this technology can play a crucial role in enabling the societal and environmental transformations necessary to deliver immediate carbon savings and keep the 1.5°C target alive. It specifically found that for Europe, 5G connectivity enabled solutions could reduce the continent’s CO2 emissions by 15 per cent by 2030 That’s the equivalent of taking one in seven of the EU’s cars off the road.

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5G connectivity could help reduce Europe’s CO2 emissions by 15 per cent by 2030. That’s the equivalent of taking one in seven of the EU’s cars of the road.

With 5G roll-out, Europe is strolling towards a more digital, low-carbon future, while other regions are sprinting in the same direction. Policymakers and regulators have a major role to play here by realizing the competitive economic, social and sustainable potential of 5G.” Borje Ekholm, CEO Ericsson.

Ericsson Climate and Connectivity report 2021

5G enables businesses to make considerable sustainability gains by increasing the energy efficiency of operations. For example, this can be achieved through better monitoring of usage, or by reducing waste and material costs through optimising management practices. The same report found that using 5G technology across the four high-emitting sectors of power, transport, manufacturing and building could raise the total emissions reduction up to 20 per cent. This is equivalent of the total annual emissions of Spain and Italy combined.

Despite these clear benefits, 5G’s roll-out across the UK isn’t where it needs to be. It is lagging behind both North America and North East Asia, with 5G population coverage currently around just 36%. As a result, in the UK, 5G market penetration has been low: with just 6% uptake, while Western Europe trails closely behind. While progress has been made in 2021 with the conclusion of a long-awaited spectrum auction in the UK, it is in danger of strolling towards a more connected, low-carbon future, while others are sprinting in the same direction.

Recent analysis commissioned by Ericsson and conducted by Analysys Mason found that the full roll out of 5G could be worth £15bn to the UK in net economic benefits, in addition to the already expected benefits of enhanced mobile broadband.

We can already see that the seismic changes that 5G can deliver are not just theoretical, they’re market ready, and are delivering carbon savings today in the UK and beyond:

A continued slow roll out of 5G and adoption here in the UK will delay the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that connectivity enables for people, business and the planet. To change this status quo, policymakers around Whitehall and regulators across the board have a major role to play by working together at pace to overcome practical, regulatory and financia l obstacles. Once 5G is understood as the backbone of the digital economy with the benefits that it offers, it will be able to reach its full potential in helping the UK to reach the sustainable recovery that it requires. For example, support from Government so that Mobile Network Operators can obtain access to deployment sites will be key. Three UK recently revealed that 50 per cent of planning applications are turned down across the country, and near enough 100 per cent are rejected in London alone.

We will also need 5G technology to enable immersive online collaboration and communication tools – helping to shrink distance, simulate physical presence and

reduce travel. Healthcare, education, road and rail can all benefit from the positive effects of a modern digital infrastructure and combine to further reduce the human impacts on the planet. Next generation connectivity can also pave the way to cleaner and smarter energy, introducing real time data and infrastructure monitoring to create “intelligent” energy networks, making today’s suppliers more efficient and flexible in response to the country’s future energy demands. Once these benefits become obvious and tangible, demand for this type of technology across both consumer and enterprise areas will be catalysed.

Developing transformative connectivity solutions The Government and telecommunications industry in the UK need to play their part in developing solutions, helping to create an environment that will foster the deployment of these technologies.

This will in turn will open up new revenue streams, grow the economy but also help the planet to drive down emissions.

Key trends in the UK - two years after 5G Launch 5G Population Coverage

36% UK UK 5G pop coverage and availability lags global peers.

84% USA

98% South Korea

72% Western Europe

Market Penetration, 5G

6% 5G uptake has been slow in the UK.

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Ericsson’s 5G Smart Factory in Lewisville, Texas uses 24% less energy and 75% less indoor water, avoiding 97% of operational carbon emissions than comparable buildings.

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In Dorset, Ericsson and Vodafone are pioneering a number of 5G innovations to revolutionise rural connections, improve conservation and farming methods and enhance the wellbeing of local communities. For example, it is home to the world’s first connected buoy and agri-trials with 5G connected robots, sensors and drones all of which can drive down carbon emissions.

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In Nottinghamshire, drones powered by 5G have been used to safeguard forest ecosystems, providing the local council with huge volumes of real time data from difficult to reach areas. This information helps teams to understand, measure and take effective action to preserve these vital resources for future generations.

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The Port of Livorno in Italy has been transformed by 5G deployed by Ericsson, using IoT sensors to track activity and provide invaluable mass data collection for decision-making and better coordination between humans and devices which can be replicated across the world. Annual cost savings of €2.5m have been estimated, with a 25% improvement in productivity and a reduction in CO2 by 8.2% per port terminal.

So that the meaningful and urgent action that is required to combat the issue of climate change can be taken, the public and private sectors need to apply the same urgency to this immediate digitisation as they have to other necessary emergency measures, as done very recently during the pandemic. Except this time, it is not a race to digitise to support remote working. It is the race for our futures.

To find out more about how Ericsson is pioneering a sustainable future through limitless connectivity see www.ericsson.com/sustainable-future

FUTURE RAN COMPETITION WINNERS Photograph Montylov

Rebuilding the British mobile infrastucture industry is a major undertaking

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IFTEEN CONSORTIA HAVE

won funding from DCMS to develop new technologies which will expand the choice that both the big mobile operators, and the growing number of companies installing private networks have when specifying equipment. The Future RAN Competition, known as FRANC, is the first of a new breed of 5G projects. In a departure from previous initiatives such as the 5G Testbeds and Trials, FRANC is intended to stimulate research and development of new infrastructure products.

The need for this comes from the dearth of suppliers of telecommunications equipment. Once there were dozens of

companies developing mobile infrastructure, from Marconi to Motorola, today there are only a few major players that are deemed secure, and in the UK that means a choice between Ericsson and Nokia. With all networks wanting to buy from at least two companies, the government wants to stimulate the market, grow british technology and generate Intellectual property.

FRANC reflects a wide mix of participants, from universities to startups, small innovative companies and major multinationals. Three of the four major mobile network operators are among the companies involved, along with one overseas operator. For example the Flex5G project has attracted international partners, leading operators and

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technologists to deliver the most flexible, advanced 5G-SA network solution that Europe has to offer.

There is an emphasis on supporting Open RAN, pioneering new technologies, and developing the components that go into mobile phone cells.

When the FRANC competition was announced, DCMS said it was looking to take a portfolio approach. It would not just fund bids designed to provide the Mobile Network Operators with complete alternatives but seek to build a British ecosystem with complementing and cooperating projects.

Here we look at the projects and how they will revolutionise the market for mobile network apparatus.

FRANC is looking to stimulate the British telecommunications industry in a new and open way. Building an ecosystem and commercial models that will sell British telecoms brilliance around the world.

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E KNOW THAT THE

UKhas brilliant scientists and technologists. Only the US has more Nobel prize winners. But too often inventions originating thanks to UK innovation have gone on to be commercialised overseas.

The Future RAN Competition - or FRANC for short - is different. This £36 million scheme will support R&D right across the UK to develop a new breed of more open and interoperable mobile networks made of equipment from a range of suppliers.

The aim of this is not just to produce new products that are globally competitive, but to speed up the construction of the more secure, resilient and innovative telecoms supply chain we need for the future.

With more than sixty companies and organisations taking part in fifteen projects, collaboration is one of the most important aspects of the FRANC. We’ve got the support of all of the main UK networks, as well as Microsoft, Cisco and many other major businesses. While the projects are part-funded by DCMS, several of these partners are contributing to the overall project cost.

Many of the projects look at more flexible, efficient and intelligent ways to build a cell, construct a network and put it all together. It’s about understanding what makes a mobile network tick and what can be done differently, including developing new components for making cells and new testing equipment to ensure the kit is working correctly.

FUNDING TABLE

Communication and cooperation between the participants will lead to them being far more than the sum of their parts, and will supercharge the government’s £250 million strategy to end our reliance on a small handful of firms to build and maintain our telecoms networks.

We all know the benefits to the economy of better digital connectivity. The government is committed to delivering the next-generation of broadband to even the most hard-to-reach parts of the UK through Project Gigabit - the biggest government-backed roll out ever seen in this country. Much of that will be fibre, but having our own 5G technology will be essential for many of the harder to reach locations.

But FRANC is not just about delivering better and smarter 5G products. The scheme is looking to stimulate the British telecommunications industry in a new and open way. It’s about building an ecosystem and commercial models that can be used to sell British telecoms brilliance around the world.

Some of this brilliance has come from the experience gathered in our 5G Testbed and Trials programme, which thanks to our £200 million investment since 2017 has developed a whole host of new uses for 5G to propel our economy and enhance people’s lives.

For example, Bristol-based Blu Wireless is working with the Airspan team in Reading to explore how to enable seamless connectivity between base stations in roadside and other mobile infrastructure, for when we and our phones are on the move.

The Best of British project, or BoB, grew out

The huge interest in the competition, with significantly more applicants than anticipated has seen a large number of projects funded.

Projects range from radio test equipment with a DCMS contribution of less than £370,000 to a British designed, built and manufactured mobile network at nearly £5m. All programmes are fund matched with the consortia providing a minimum of 40 per cent of the development cost.

Figures given here are just for the DCMS element of the funding.

of a Rural Connected Communities project just south of Stonehenge which found that there was a lack of suppliers of small cells suitable for the new breed of small network.

I consider myself very lucky to have become the minister responsible for telecoms just as FRANC is starting out. As I write this, we are finalising the contracts with a view to projects kicking off in early 2022. I’m looking forward to getting out and about to meet the teams and learn more about each one.Once the projects have developed their early-stage products, they will be able to put them to test in Sonic Labs - a state-of-the-art facility backed by a £16 million government investment that enables telecoms companies to gather granular levels of data on how their equipment behaves in a fully interoperable, technology-neutral mobile network.

The article here explains what each of the projects is working on. Use it as a guide to aid communication, cooperation and collaboration.

Julia Lopez Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport

5G DRIVE ......................................................................................................................................

ARI-5G .............................................................................................................................................

BEACON-5G ..............................................................................................................................

Best of British .........................................................................................................................

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DU-Volution ...............................................................................................................................

ECORAN ........................................................................................................................................

Flex-5G ............................................................................................................................................

FRATS ..............................................................................................................................................

Open RAN GaN ......................................................................................................................

O-RANOS .....................................................................................................................................

Proteus ...........................................................................................................................................

Scalable Optical Fronthaul .......................................................................................

Secure 5G Platform using Novel, Efficient Wideband PA .......

TAPSCORP .................................................................................................................................

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£1,430,470 £2,377,686 £1,568,562 £4,957,149 £4,732,473 £4,659,606 £492,000 £4,681,242 £365,641 £2,435,528 £1,937,528 £3,718,751 £1,526,886 £1,097,950 £1,928,756

5G DRIVE

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major challenge for every mobile operator is the integration of the private networks in a secure and cost-effective manner.

This project sets out to solve that problem for the industry.

The project sees one of the largest operators in the UK working with one of the smallest. Led by Virgin Mobile O2, The 5G Drive consortium brings together Wavemobile, Cisco, Ori Industries, and the University of Warwick. Wavemobile brings its expertise in depolying small, specialist networks targetted at notspots. Ori Industries is expert at deploying cloud-based edge processing technologies.

Rapid growth and interest in private networks means a more streamlined approach needs to be taken to get private and public networks working side by side. In the past it has been possible to treat each instance as a special case but the volume of new deployments makes this impractical.

The 5G Drive project is developing an 5G Open and Diversified RAN Integration solution for private mobile networks, that is low cost, secure, and capable of integrating with public networks. The consortium will also include a ‘Vendor Evaluation phase’ for private 5G RAN vendors to test their networks against the solution concepts.

The objective is to make it easier for the customers of the mobile network operators to install their own private enterprise networks in a manner which is as uncomplicated for both parties as possible.

The business opportunity for the project is to find a low cost and secure solution that will allow Diversified/open private 5G network RAN vendors to be easily Integrated into public networks, as well as carrying out Vendor Evaluation of the developed Future RAN Competition solutions too.

BEACON-5G

he Telecom Infra Project-led Accelerating RAN Intelligence in 5G project (ARI-5G) will drive progress on network management and optimisation for Open RAN. Specifically, ARI-5G examines how the RAN is operated in a multi-vendor environment, focusing on the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and its role in network automation, providing fine grained, use case driven control and management of RAN resources.

An interoperable ecosystem will benefit the entire telecommunications industry, and the demonstration of multi-vendor network management models will be a key enabler to adoption.

This project will look to validate interoperable architectures while seeding technical capabilities in the industry.

Although elements of Open RAN-based architectures are increasingly being deployed worldwide, several of the specific technologies are still in developmental stages.

The aim of FRANC is that development activity and the subsequent creation of new standards can occur in the UK. The programme ensures that devlopment activity and creating new standards occurs in the UK, and incorporates many UK partners.

Most network operators are enthusiastic but also cautious about Open RAN, and technology vendors still need to prove various concepts before purchase orders will be made by operators in larger numbers.

The caution means that some vendors have been reluctant to invest because the marketplace is still developing. This project can provide validated solutions that can unlock demand and encourage further investment Led by TIP, the Telecom Infra project, the consortium includes Accelleran, Amdocs, AttoCore, BT, VIAVI and West Midlands 5G.

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eacon-5G will develop a high performance Open RAN 5G system aligned with Open RAN framework and principles, focusing on reconfigurability, security, trustworthiness, and service architecture agility.

Led by Toshiba Europe, the project consortium brings together recognised global technology leaders, Toshiba and Thales, along with four Tier 1 International O-RAN equipment suppliers - Accelleran, Benetel, Effnet, Phluido and a prominent UK 5G core network solutions provider, Attocore.

Also involved is NDEC, a UK centre of excellence in cyber resilience, the Institute for Future Transportation and Cities at Coventry University, and two public sector organizations - South Gloucestershire Council UK , University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire NHS UK. with ambitious digital transformation agendas.

The broader vision is to realise a highperformance 5G system that can be rapidly reconfigured and optimised for diverse industrial and consumer applications. These may be in private local networks, or public carrier networks. Deployments, from mobile network operators (MNOs) or non-MNOs, can be extended to both industrial and consumer sectors in indoor as well as outdoor environments The goal of building a high-performance, robust, versatile, and resilient 5G system based on general-purpose hardware, thirdparty RAN and core components, and openinterface solutions is not possible without solving a significant number of challenges.

The project provides various technological innovations toward some of the main functional priority areas identified by DCMS, thereby playing a key role in achieving the goals of the UK Government’s 5G supply chain diversification strategy.

Best of British

CoMP-O-RAN

DU-Volution

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est of British, or BoB will build high performance small cells 100 per cent designed and manufactured in the UK. The apparatus it produces will significantly reduce the cost of deploying a small network through advanced radio design, while expertise in engineering low power consumption cells will reduce the environmental impact and running costs.

The Project is led by Telet Research, which as a full operator member of the GSMA bills itself as the fifth UK mobile network. It will be working alongside specialist cell manufacturer cellXica and Southampton University spin-out AccelerComm.

Existing equipment uses generalised algorithms for some aspects of cell design.

AccelerComm optimises these for 5G to deliver substantial performance gains. A network built using hardware designed with this technology will need 20 percent fewer cells than a network built with existing technology to provide the same level of coverage . Working closely with the engineering team at cellXica means that the technology can be delivered in a short timescale.

The relationship between the partners was as a direct result of UK5G organised events for FRANC. The cell the project will design will be built in a short production run aimed at serving private, local government and industrial owned networks which operate within UK Shared and Local Access Spectrum.

The project will offer a complete Neutral Network solution which includes spectrum acquisition, numbering, core and operator interconnect. This is a much more comprehensive offering than most end to end offerings. Existing test and trial locations in Liverpool, the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire and other urban, suburban and rural test beds that were established in earlier 5G RCC and Create projects will validate the technology.

he Coordinated Multipoint Open Radio Access Network (CoMP-ORAN) will deploy densified outdoor small cell clusters using 5G New Radios (NR) to complement existing mobile networks, reduce the cost-per-bit and deliver enhanced 5G network performance.

The project is led by 5G Neutral Host Operator Dense Air, working with Airspan Communications, Blu Wireless, Radisys and the University of Glasgow.

Building radio backhaul into a cell significantly reduces the need for expensive fibre installations. At the same time, CoMPO-RAN will provide enhanced performance in the form of better coverage and higher capacity. This will enable mobile network operators to deliver excellent 5G at a significantly lower cost-per-bit and enabling faster deployment timelines by removing the need for the installation of fibre backhaul at each cell in a cluster.

This project will develop a novel 5G New Radio CoMP algorithm and software implementation, plus a new 5G RAN product with an integrated mmWave fronthaul capability developed by Blu Wireless. The project encompasses the full lifecycle, from concept design through to prototyping and proof-of-concept deployments, which will be used for validation in preparation for mass commercial deployment.

It is anticipated that the product, developed and prototyped in the UK will be widely exported, initially targeting markets where Dense Air operates.

The solution will be validated at the AutoAir testbed at the Millbrook automotive proving ground, an existing DCMS 5G funded project, providing a secure environment to evaluate and document the solutions impact in real-world scenarios ahead of scaled commercial deployments.

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ne of the most challenging components in a mobile network site is the ‘Distributed Unit’ or DU. This performs signal processing, converting radio signals to data traffic that can then be transported by the microwave, optical and wireline networks to the core network infrastructure.

The project will develop Distributed Unit devices to meet industry requirements including reduced power, smaller form factors, improved spectrum efficiency and reduced latency.

Working principally with UK based vendors, it will integrate products into an operational Distributed Unit component that is ready for deployment in 5G networks.

Through this integration, the collaborators will accelerate the understanding of component integration, knowledge which can then be embedded into emerging Open RAN standards.

Open and stable interfaces are at the root of Open RAN, enabling innovation through the selection of component vendors to meet specific market requirements.

Led by ADVA Optical Networking, the consortium comprises AccelerComm and CommAgility, both of whom are experts in the deepest level of cell architecture, along with BT and the University of York. The fifth member, the Scotland 5G Centre, provides project co-ordination and leading collaboration with other projects and organisations. Testing of the DU will initially be conducted at labs in the North of England supported by ADVA UK, with later testing taking place at BT’s Adastral Park facility.

Development of the Distributed Unit through the project will reflect market requirements, for example neutral host deployments, where the innovation of Open RAN delivers benefits over traditional architectures.

ECORAN

Flex-5G

Future RAN Advanced Test System

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he Energy-efficient Cloudlets for ORAN, or ECORAN project will reduce the power consumption of the commodity hardware used by Open RAN. A cloudlet is a small-scale server cluster which provides low latency data processing close to the smartphones, tablets and wearable devices it is designed to serve. It is a form of Edge processing. While Fog Computing needs connection to the cloud and Mobile Edge Computing is always standalone, Cloudlets can operate in either mode.

ECORAN looks to reduce the energy consumption of cloudlets by introducing novel ways of interconnecting and managing the cloudlet servers, accelerators, storage and interfaces.

The project is led by the University of Leeds in partnership with Ultracell Networks.

ECORAN takes an intelligent approach to scaling capacity as it is needed. For example, demand peaks may be witnessed in stadiums, in shopping centres and in city centres for short durations during a match, during the lunch hours or during an event.

The servers currently consume around 20 per cent of the total power consumption of the Cloudlet. This is expected to rise to over 80 per cent of the total power consumption.

The processing capability per server has increased slowly, but the network interconnecting servers has evolved from 1 Gb/s to 10Gb/s server interfaces, to its current standard 100Gb/s rate. Speeds of 400Gb/s per server connection are expected soon. Initial results show that the power consumption of the network interconnecting the servers can be reduced by around 82 per cent and a similar reduction in latency, of around 85 per cent, is observed by eliminating the hierarchies of the switches that connect the servers.

Implementing fundamental changes to its complete 5G SA network, Flex-5G has a tagline ofFlexible, Efficient and HighPerformance 5G Open RAN. The project’s network or sub-parts thereof that can take many forms, even combining the whole 5G SA network into one box similar in physical appearance to a desktop computer, server or workstation, as might be installed in a factory or office.

Led by systems integrators AWTG, the consortium is impressive for having three mobile operators working together: Vodafone and Virgin Mobile O2, along with Zain from Saudi Arabia. The roll-call adds Lime Microsystems, University of Surrey 5G..6GIC, CommScope, Viavi, Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC), Amazon Web Services and Cambridgeshire County Council. Five of the members of the consortium are unfunded in that they will contribute to the project without receiving support from the DCMS grant.

Flex-5G is fully Open RAN compliant so can be broken down into constituent distributed modules that can interoperate with modules created by others. This presents vast flexibility and diversification benefits. The solution is at the cutting-edge of “software radio”, doing as much as possible in software using general purpose processors in conjunction with other programmable elements. Flex-5G leverages the flexibility of its software-basis applied to this commodity hardware to increase the performance and efficiency of the 5G network, and to improve upgradability, customization to use cases, robustness and security through software patches and configuration options. OOther cutting-edge 5G innovations are introduced in Flex-5G, most notably key advances on Massive MIMO technology—improving the performance and practicality of high-end 5G networks.

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lthough the smallest project in FRANC in terms of funding, the FRAT project packs a punch and will produce equipment to be used in the development of mobile base station infrastructure.

Radio test systems have historically required customized, home-brewed setups.

As much time and cost can be spent debugging the test setup as is spent designing the radio. This creates a significant barrier to entry for radio developers, as the development team not only requires radio expertise but also requires digital skills to develop baseband emulators. AceAxis, in partnership with MAC Limited will build a Future RAN Advanced Test system, for use by radio network equipment vendors who are designing, building and testing 5G Future RAN radios. A standardised solution will encourage new entrants to focus on innovation of the radio and the antenna.

Swindon based AceAxis has a history of building equipment which optimises the use of radio spectrum on cell sites so that different frequencies don’t interfere with one another. MAC, which is based in Southampton, has been experience of the specification, design and implementation of wireless systems going back to 2G. Future RAN interfaces are clearly defined.

Using these interfaces, along with 3GPP definitions, provides the opportunity for the Future RAN Advanced Test system to become a trusted industry standard for developing 5G radios. By allowing radio developers to focus on their areas of expertise, FRAT will reduce barriers to entry and encourage 5G radio supply chain diversification.

Building on AceAxis existing products this project will create a standardised, costeffective, off-the-shelf solution that covers the key RF measurements with the Future RAN optical interface, in a single unit.

Open RAN GaN

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lmost every piece of 5G hardware requires multiple semiconductor switching devices to generate the signals being transmitted. Gallium nitride (GaN) switching devices are used in a wide range of applications from consumer electronics to defence radar systems. UK developed GaN technology is used in NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.

GaN is set to become the technology of choice for 5G communications hardware due to its high frequency operation and high-power density.

The ORanGaN project will develop a sovereign UK supply chain, including manufacturing processes, and packaging solutions for radio frequency gallium nitride (RF-GaN) devices.

Manufacturing will take place at the chip Fab near Newcastle.

The project is led by INEX Microtechnology, working with Custom Interconnect, Viper RF and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult.

High demand has led to a worldwide shortage of manufacturing and design capacity for semiconductors including GaN devices. Currently, there are no UK manufactured GaN devices suitable for 5G applications. All current 5G hardware uses semiconductor devices made offshore instead.

Inex manufactures RF-Gan devices used in radar systems, however working at the higher levels of precision required to work at 5G frequencies poses new challenges: it requires smaller feature sizes, and a higher degree of control than for lower frequency radar applications. This project will deliver a new UK based manufacturing processes, facilities and device designs required by 5G. The project will enhance the UK’s manufacturing capacity for GaN devices in the mobile supply chain.

-RANOS main motivation is to address key architectural and technological challenges for deploying end-to-end O-RAN multi-domain (private-public) interoperable networks.

This will allow the creation of new business models that can be used for both Enterprise and public sector customers as well developing new use cases.

Led by the Cellnex Connectivity Solutions and working with University of Bristol, Attocore, Weaver Labs, Satellite Applications Catapult and Parallel Wireless the project will add value to the O-RAN Alliance specifications by particularly focusing on the emerging public and private 5G network multi-vendor Open RAN environment and their interworking challenges. To achieve this, O-RANOS will leverage the rApps and xApps development framework supported by the Open RAN architecture. The project will develop x and r application templates that will enable APIs to interact with the A1 and E2 interfaces as well as Machine Learning production models (CNFs predictors). For example, a key focus for xApps development will be RIC based handover between public and private networks.

To extend further the opportunity of privatepublic interoperation, the project will implement novel backhauling and neutral hosting services with a particular focus on satellite backhaul (mainly GEO and LEO constellations) for connecting to different core vendors.

In order to aid the development of further features, validate outcomes and accelerate deployment, O-RANOS will build an AppStore that will deploy and manage applications. An example will be implementing a Zero Trust approach for security. ML training phase and production models will be leveraged as part of the AppStore offering.

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roteus is breaking open the proprietary nature of mobile base stations by creating a flexible layer of software which interfaces directly to the radio hardware. This will allow companies, large and small, outside the handful of big vendors to develop competitive products which are quicker to market, lower cost and have lower -power consumption.

Existing equipment uses designs dictated by the choice of the baseband processor. The Proteus Open RAN architecture will separate, or abstract, the underlying hardware from the baseband processor.

Slotting in a new processor will no longer require a redesign of the whole cell, giving the manufacturer a wider choice of suppliers and the ability to upgrade as new processors become available. The improved choice extends to the ability to use CPUs designed for general computing applications such as PCs and servers, not just dedicated mobile phone baseband processors. This reduces the costs and improves supply chain resilience.

The consortium is led by Parallel Wireless with ARM, BT, the University of Bristol, Wireless Excellence and Real Wireless.

They bring with them a deep understanding of 5G Open RAN, chip design expertise, the largest mobile network in the UK, detailed knowledge and patents on new radio innovations, an existing portfolio of 5G hardware and expertise on the mobile industry.

By abstracting the physical layer from the compute, the new design introduces a freedom to innovate. It means better, cheaper, and more capable equipment can be brought to market sooner. Equipment manufacturers can have a more comprehensive portfolio of products with reduced cost of software maintenance.

Scalable Optical Fronthaul

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adio antennas are connected to base stations using fibre optic cables. This eliminates the losses which are inherent in an electrical connection.

The link between the antenna and base station is known as fronthaul. The project will develop ground-breaking, UK-made, scalable, costeffective optical interface technology, to enable the dense roll out of optical fibre 5G radio access networks with open digital interfaces for interoperability and low latency.

It is led by Rushmere Technology, working with Teropta, BT, Compound Semiconductor Centre and Aston University. Rushmere is based in Ipswich, and an expert in passive optical networks, using high power lasers to eliminate the need for amplifiers and significantly reducing the cost of deployment.

Nottingham based TerOpta specialises in remote sensing and cloud-based analysis of environmental and pollution data. Its IoT expertise comes from a senior team with experience of R&D at major telecommunications companies such as Marconi and Ericsson, giving TerOpta a great deal of experience in communications, monitoring and control technology.

Compound semiconductors are chips that amplify power and light, and use materials other than silicon. An established technology, semiconductors have been typically used for high power applications, but the fast-switching properties of compound semiconductors make them useful a number of different aspects of 5G network and handset design.

The Compound Semiconductor Centre is part of the Cardiff cluster of companies and institutions which are pioneering the development and implementation of this technology. It is as a joint venture between IQE plc, the leading supplier of advanced compound semiconductor wafer products, and Cardiff University.

Secure Wideband PA Platform

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he Power Amplifier, or PA, is the chip which puts the energy into a radio signal. It’s an essential part of all mobile phone base stations.

This project uses world leading British expertise to develop a more efficient PA, for base stations with a power output of up to 10W, along with the hardware and software needed to drive it in a flexible and secure manner. This will work alongside a radio architecture devloped by the project.

Led by The Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, the consortium also comprises Lime Microsystems, Slipstream Engineering Design, and quantum cryptography experts Arqit.

The consortium will develop a 5G Open RAN platform that uses Software Defined Radio to produce a signal across a wider range of frequencies, up to 10 GHz, than is typically available. This will allow infrastructure manufacturers to build more efficient mobile base stations which work across more frequency bands. It’s a solution which is particularly necessary in dense urban environments.

Compound Semiconductors are particularly well-suited to Power Amplifiers, providing the fast switching needed for 5G, and high efficiency between the amount of power put into the circuit and that radiated by the antenna. Bradford based Slipstream Engineering Design is an RF design company, while Lime Microsystems has a portfolio of Software Defined Radio products.

As well as developing a more flexible and scalable radio the team will also integrate a new security layer based on Arqit’s QuantumCloud platform that will provide security by default in the operation of the system by using stronger, simpler encryption that is unbreakable even with a quantum computer.

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TAPSCORP

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obile networks are now too complex for operators to be sure that manual control of the network provides the best experience for the customer.

Open RAN adds modular components, often from multiple vendors, so the difficulty of managing the network increases further.

This project uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, along with the latest advances in cloud technology to optimise the network more efficiently.

The ‘Towards AI Powered and Secure CarrierGrade Open RAN Platform’ (TAPSCORP) consortium brings together Metaswitch, which was acquired by Microsoft in July 2020, Intel R&D, Capgemini and the University of Edinburgh.

Machine learning algorithms can dynamically configure next-generation telecoms networks in a way that will not only improve connectivity but also create significant economic opportunities, enabling new UK innovations.

The AI compute capabilities acessable in the cloud are capable of optimising performance, improved management, and detecting anomalies across various disaggregated RAN components.

The virtualisation of cloud technologies provides higher levels of security and the ability to scale required for the large disaggregated networks deployed by national carriers.

The combination of Open RAN and edge computing brings an opportunity to create customised interactions between the RAN and applications through slicing and beyond, enabling new 5G applications and services, such as augmented and virtual reality , manufacturing, and gaming. The extensive developer ecosystem can also leverage cloud APIs to reap the benefits of programmable networks promised by the Open RAN architecture.

5prinG is in the air(waves) Regional champions in the West Midlands didn’t have to look far for ideas on how to capitalise on 5G. The heartland of England has a rich industrial heritage as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and modern manufacturing, described by the UK’s International Trade Minister Graham Stuart MP as the historic “workshop of the world”.

M

ANUFACTURING IN THE

West Midlands today is worth £32 billion to the UK economy annually, employs more than 300,000 manufacturing people, and the region boasts household names including including JLR (Jaguar LandRover), Rolls Royce and Boeing.

But making sure that West Midlands industry maintains its leadership – and those jobs – was just one of the challenges being tackled by the umbrella organisation promoting 5G in the West Midlands 5G (WM5G).

A dynamic and energetic Mayor, Andy Street, bought into the idea of using 5G to promote West Midlands industry and services very early on, soon after he was elected Mayor in 2017.

“Andy threw his weight into it – he was determined make the West Midlands the centre for 5G. The Mayor was being super-supportive and his buy-in and enthusiasm galvanised the team,” says Lesley Holt, Accelerator & Communications Director for WM5G, Holt.

WM5G kicked off in March 2018.

I SPY STRANGERS

Now, three years in, says WM5G MD, Robert Franks, “We have delivered our initial objectives. The planning environment for putting cell sites on top of buildings changed radically with the introduction of the new ECC. Electronics Communications Code , in 2017”.

“It was very well intended, but it has effectively changed the business model for putting masts on the top of buildings, created a lot of confusion, and has slowed the roll out. It can take three years to get planning permission.”

So the organisation found itself working to smooth the path for the operators when they hit planning obstacles at the local level.

“We’ve got a good relationship with all the seven local authorities at different levels. So we created a 5G Digital Forum, which nominates champions for each local authority. Part of our activity has been building those relationships and getting those champions on board,” says Holt.

The champions are there to navigate the local authority’s processes.

“When we come across a planning problem, we get the details. We’ve broken down some

One of the 5prinG smart cities projects from Aralia can help with the menace of flytipping. Aralia has developed an AI-enabled camera which can operate in low light at remote locations.

Onboard algorithms can detect the illegal dumping of waste, and help authorities to identify the flytippers. The system runs continuously, with autonomous monitoring of specified regions of interest within the system’s field of view. Alerts are sent in real-time giving the location of the fly-tipping incident, plus additional information such as the colour of the car. The system is also being tested to help detect trespassing on UK railways, with installations at two railway stations.

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problems, and had planning instances dismissed after we’ve intervened and resurrected the application.”

Part of the job is changing the mindset, from seeing planning as a short-term profit centre to a long-term economic advantage.

“It helps when local authorities understanding the opportunities. Previously a lot was a revenue generator. They needed to help educate their organisations about what the opportunities were.”

That hard work is paying off.

The West Midlands came top of all the English combined authorities for 5G coverage. Admittedly, 22 per cent extent of coverage sounds like a low base, but it’s nevertheless a base that others envy, and other regions can learn a lot from the comprehensive efforts that WM5G has made to ease the path of network deployment.

The 5prinG accelerator is another example of an innovative, proactive approach to stimulating the region economically, fulfilling Franks’ second objective. It’s an accelerator that acts like a platform, or matchmaker – an intermediary that matches demand for new applications and 5G use cases from local

WEST MIDLANDS

industry to suppliers who have something to help. The former include big corporates and local businesses for example, while on the supply side, are industry parties who can help.

“Birmingham has largest number of startups outside of London - it has an amazing base. However, when you look at the data from the scale up industry - although there are some great success stories like GymShark, there aren’t enough of them,” Franks explains. “The number of ‘scale ups’ has gone backwards – and we need to do more to support these organisations to grow.”

One reason for this, he suggests, is that the supporting infrastructure outside London is not as mature: the region receives three per cent of the venture capital investment that London receives. Hence the need for a startup incubator.

“We’ve got amazing startups, just above the network layer, who are developing applications, services and platforms, and who have brilliant ideas for how we can use 5G combined with other things like IoT and AI to improve industry.”

The 5prinG consortium by O2, Deloitte, Telefonica’s innovation hub Wayra, and the Digital Catapult. 5prinG opened the first

The West Midlands was the powerhouse of the first industrial revolution, now 5G is providing the springboard for a connectivity revolution.

accelerator in Birmingham in March 2020, with facilities in Coventry and Wolverhampton to follow. Each has a private 5G network.The accelerator helps those late stage startups reach develop prototypes, but also provides an education function for a broader range of businesses.

“It’s an environment where organisations of any size can experience 5G,” Franks explains.

Over 500 organisations have already taken advantage of it.

“We throw out challenges then work with startups, usually over a three month period to meet that challenge and move that business on.” 5prinG eschewed the equity model, where it makes capital investments in the startup and sees advantages indirectly. Instead it wants them to grow, or even move to the region.

“5pringG delivers a range of programmes; if an organisation wants to find out more about 5G, we can help them - they can join a shorter one to two day event,” says Holt.

“The longer 12-week programmes are themed - we’ll identify a sector and some

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demand side owners, and invite them to come on board.” 5prinG typically takes in around 12 to 15 organisations at a time, and a winning project has multiple sponsors.

For examples, seven local authorities signed up to the Smart Cities challenge.

“That identified four or five key areas that they wanted addressing. We then did an innovation call - whatever the challenge for supply side organisations, they can then show them a product or idea.”

The selection process has winnowed around 90 applicants down to 16. WM5G hopes to reach some 2,000 businesses via 5prinG. Those key vertical sectors, include transport, manufacturing and live events. It functions as a kind of platform, or match-maker, peering demand for 5G with possible suppliers.

WM5G’s earlier programmes provide a taste of what enterprise can do with advanced network, at times, influencing the business at a profound level.

MANUFACTURING The idea of 5G-gleaned data allowing new business cases has been recognised more broadly at the 5G private network

Worcester 5G, Ericsson, BT and DCMS have paid for us to get through this project

at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry. This will allow manufacturers to share lessons learned from applying robotics to the modern factory.

Here the High Value Manufacturing Catapult encourages SMEs to adopt new technology. “Six hundred SMEs a year go through it,” says Frank.

NexGWorkx, owned by Malvern Hills Science Park, offers something similar: ‘Testbed as a Service’. NexGWorkx has been involved in a private 5G network that seek improves safety on construction sites, in partnership with PLINX. See www.bit. ly/3Gtjp58.

TRANSPORT WM5G has over a dozen transport products and services under development.

“These are based around exploring operational efficiencies, supporting expansion betting more people to use services and connecting them better, and improving the customer experience,” explains Chris Holmes, a director at WM5G. The first generation trials included Appyway, which improves parking by deploying

sensors sensors that report back the availability of parking spaces real-time.

Another, Vivacity, took advantage of the CCTV cameras fixed at road junction sensors, only instead of fining motorists, it gauges the density of traffic.

GoMedia did something similar, only counting passenger volumes on trams. It also reports back in real-time – something not possible with manual sampling. And Ericsson has demonstrated a proof-ofconcept that uses the infastructure itself to monitor user density, anonymously.

Ericsson’s innovation used the signal from the handset to look at the scattering of the data and determine how many road users were

active. Ericsson’s mast-as-a-sensor initiative uses machine learning to turn the radio wave characteristics into vehicle counts. Data already comes from analog sensors – but these could be removed, as a 5G mast covers wider area.

Several experiments have endured. The region has a 5G road sensor network, with weather sensing as well, in partnership with Transport for West Midlands.

One discovery that WM5G has absorbed is that real-world business cases of 5G really need a solid uplink, which is rarely hyped.

“Three of those projects used upload, rather than the much talked about download”, observes Holmes.

The combination of 5G and artificial intelligence is being developed to look for unusual patterns in traffic to combat car theft. For example, thieves will use a car for transporting the gang to steal cars, and then drive in a convoy to their destination. Such a pattern can be recognised, so that the police can react before a report of theft has been made by the owner. Video surveillance operator Bikal is working with the University of Kent to develop the system. Bikal and Kent are also examining new ways that police might to react to the detection, by deploying mobile police cars and drones. The project takes advantage of the edge technologies within the Wayra accelerator.

DATA MINING TO FIND STOLEN CARS

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WEST MIDLANDS

have teamed up to produce it. Angel trains is a rolling stock leasing company, West Midlands Trains an operating company.

The project sends alerts to the train operating companies (TOCs) as quickly as possible.

High resolution is footage is required, and this needs high bandwidth network capacity.

This is also an example where the higher capacity uplink path of 5G is vital, allowing use cases not possible before.

West Midlands 5G has over a dozen transport products and services underdevelopment. This will soon include a 5G road sensor network.

The rail network is also getting some 5G attention in three trials. The West Midlands was the first tram system in the UK to use 5G. These projects provide something similar for network planners – determining the real-world usage.

Two of the projects are vital for safety: monitoring in real-time the state of a train’s pantograph – the apparatus that connects the carriage to the overhead lines, and the state of the track itself. Transmisson Dynamics’ Jenny Hudson explains that kinks and cracks in the overhead wire are harbingers of trouble to come.

“Breakages can cause potential disruption to service and in extreme cases, risk to life as well.” The longer those go unresolved, the greater the danger to the public.

The hoIistic pantograph damage assessment system uses Streams high definition image processing which provides measurements of the wire stagger and carbon wear. JR Dynamics, Newcastle University, Angel Trains, West Midlands Trains and AQ Ltd

HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE Connectivity can make a difference in terms of improving the region’s health. WM5G has examined a range of areas where 5G can be applied, ranging from prevention, to managing long-term conditions, to emergency response.

One headline-grabbing initiative saw the region host the UK’s first ultra-sound scan over a 5G network. The demonstration, in 2019, was the first showcase of how 5G and virtual augmented reality over the new network.

The greater bandwidth offered by 5G allowed the scan to be performed on the go, and the information relayed to a consultant to make an instant diagnosis. Long-term, the technology could result in fewer patients being required to book in as out patients at the hospital.

While that was a demo, WM5G also allowed five care homes in the region to be connected, allowing residents to receive full GP consultations. GPs could perform ‘ward rounds’ remotely using IoT capabilities.

That’s turned into a mature operational system planned for use in thirty care homes.

More recently, WM5G has been involved in a new, less invasive form of endoscopy, using tiny cameras the size of a large vitamin pill, to scan and photograph a patient’s small intestine to check for abnormalities. Capsule endoscopy requires a laptop and a data recorder, but it’s far less invasive than the long flexible endoscope currently used by clinicians. The potential for making this mobile is obvious – a kit can be mailed to patients rather than requiring them to make an out patient visit.

And the need, with a cancer backlog caused by the pandemic reaching two million patients, is obvious. See www.bit.ly/3GyN8JS. With three 5G private networks on stream, each at a 5prinG hub, there’s plenty of opportunity to experiment without breaking the public network.

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CONSTRUCTION SITE PLINX makes a network of sensors that improves safety on construction sites. The company, based at Malvern Hill Science Park, PLINX has been working with the Worcestershire 5G testbed.

Primarily used to protect workers hearing by mapping the soundscape of dangerous areas such as construction sites, it incorporates microphones into ear defenders. The system currently uses its own proprietary wireless technology, and logs on-site hazards such as close proximity to machines through a purpose-built platform. The data gathered is used to demonstrate compliance with health and safety guidelines, and identify high-risk hazards.

Sensors are placed around the site and attached to machinery and around the perimeter of an exclusion zone. A tag attached to a worker’s hard hat alerts them if they are near a hazard. It also monitors if their behaviour is considered hazardous. If it is, the worker is notified and an event is logged in the platform.

The product is being used by HS2, and has been put to use during the Covid-19 pandemic to help maintain social distancing.

Data can be analysed to improve worker safety, and reduce the potential of an outbreak.

PLINX is designed so that all the processing and analysis of hazardous scenarios is done at the edge of the network, on the wearers device. This allows the tags to be smaller and lighter, as they need to communicate with the network less frequently, making them easier for the user to wear.

A PLINX TeamTag can understand its relationship to other tags nearby, but does not have the ability to consider other activity occurring elsewhere in the system which could make wearers activity more hazardous.

With its higher bandwidth and greater speeds, 5G will enable the PLINX safety system to share data in real-time to identify worker movements on site. The ability to respond immediately to changing circumstances will significantly increase the safety of operations on complex development sites. This will increase both efficiencies and provide valuable data to plan future site layouts better.

CBRS: The Everyman Mobile Network Effective use and dynamic allocation of spectrum is seen as the future for frequency farming. In the US it’s already a success. Now is the time to learn from the experience.

Both Ofcom and DCMS have been looking to the future of spectrum. There is a lesson to be learned from America where Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) has liberalised access. But there is a lot more to a network than Spectrum. Mavenir’s VP Market Strategy & Business Development, Tushar Dhar, explains the technology and what is needed to make the most of it.

Citizen Band Radio conjures up images of early 80’s culture with Smokey and The Bandit asking Breaker 1-4 for a copy.

Citizen Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS isn’t completely unrelated, and is understanding it is important if you want to have a feel for the future of mobile networks.

CB Radio opened up a generation to radio communications. It took the techie world of Standing Wave Ratios and Morse Code, and made it accessible. In the days before cellular phones, CB was the walkie talkie for the everyman. Today CBRS does that for mobile phones. The American licensing regime has opened up the market in a spectacular way.

As a pioneering technology company Mavenir has used its speed, flexibility and comprehensive set of network components to take advantage of the opportunity and has rolled out CBRS networks in record time.

No discussion about CBRS is ever very far from a discussion about warships. They stealthily float into the conversation because they own the spectrum, but in an odd interpretation of howitzers into ploughshares, it’s spectrum they share.

The frequencies of 3550 MHz to 3700 MHz, known as band 48, belong to the US military. But for much of the time they are not used, so the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came up with a pecking order system for rights to use the spectrum.

The FCC’s three-tier system gives highest priority to the users in Tier 1. That’s incumbent organisations, those who are giving up the spectrum to share it. They are principally the military which uses it for seaborne radar, but also for some landbased applications. The Tier 1 users are allowed to use some or all 150 MHz of the spectrum which was theirs in the first place. Besides military (who could use some or all spectrum between 35503700MHz), other users in Tier 1 include satellite ground earth stations (typically use 3600-3650MHz) and fixed wireless Internet Service Providers (typically use 3650-3700MHz for a finite period).

Tier 2 consists of priority access licence (PAL) holders. Up to 70 MHz of the spectrum within the lower part of the CBRS range is set aside for these users (3550-3650MHz). The FCC granted 20,625

The frequencies used by CBRS have been shared by the incumbents, principally the US Military which uses spectrum for naval radar. A coastal system listens out for passing ships.

across 228 bidders and raised $4.58bn in an auction.

Tier 2 includes up to seven channels of 10 MHz each. A given PAL owner may use up to 40 MHz in a county-based licence area. All PAL owners together may use up to 70 MHz total in each licence area, leaving space for Tier 3.

Tier 3 is everyone else, known as general authorised access (GAA) users. These users don’t pay for the spectrum and can use the full 150 MHz providing no other GAA users are there, and they have to relinquish spectrum to any Tier 2 or 1 user who may want it. Similarly, Tier 2 needs to cede to Tier 1. So, if a college wants to run a network for a sports event, the equipment logs into the database, checks which frequencies are clear and can start transmitting. If one of the priority users – typically the major mobile network operators – needs the capacity, the college will be moved to other frequencies within the 150 MHz available. The combination of listening and database lookup means frequency allocation is fully dynamic, reallocated in milliseconds, but it requires additional infrastructure known as the Spectrum Access System (SAS). SAS is

Cloud Powered Capabilities The Mavenir CBRS Private Network allows users to access services in a cost-effective manner by using network elements comprising: Mavenir Evolved Packet Core, O-RAN central units, and components of Mavenir Digital Enablement platform. The solution allows for centralised management of all private network components, including providing onboarding, charging, billing, accounting, and other BSS capabilities.

managed by authorised third party administrators. SAS employs environmental sensing capability sensors that are set up along the US coastline listening out for use of the spectrum typically by incumbent users.

As skills build and the equipment becomes more available it should be as easy to install a Mavenir 4G or 5G network as it is to set up WiFi. “At an enterprise level, it does not require big expertise or incredible knowledge like being a mobile network operator, you can actually do it more like an IT infrastructure”,

says Stefano Cantarelli, CMO and Executive Vice President at Mavenir. The company already has three radio units certified for CBRS use. What in 4G is called an eNodeB and in 5G is a gNodeB, in CBRS is known as a CBSD, or Citizens Broadband Radio Service Device. They consist of two indoor units and one outdoor. Each will work in 5, 10 and 20MHz slots within all of the 150 MHz of CBRS spectrum. The indoor units give coverage of up to 8,000 square feet, while the outdoor unit is rated at 5W. The CBSDs attach to Mavenir’s Distributed Unit, Centralised Unit and Core.

The expertise extends beyond the CBRS frequencies with the company developing millimeter wave equipment aimed at providing high speed fixed wireless broadband in rural environments, private enterprise use cases, be it warehousing manufacturing, or security monitoring of premises and also talking to operators for extending their network coverage. Where there are holes currently in the 4G network, they are looking at providing extension to those coverages using the CBRS plan. .

A typical use case is a factory where the CBRS network is used to provide wireless coverage for robots and autonomous

guided vehicles. In this environment typically voice would not be required. The existing deployments are typically non-Standalone 5G or 4G; it’s still early days but discussions with new users are looking at 5G SA based architecture from the start.

Cantarelli says that the mobile network operators will need to discover some agility to make the most of the opportunity if the UK moves to a CBRS type system.

“We need to make them aware that things are happening. They can take advantage of the situation, or they can lose a lot, if they don’t think how they can be part of the ecosystem.”

Dynamic spectrum with CBRS is just one aspect of the technology which allows Mavenir to rapidly deploy networks. Its virtualised Open Architecture based approach enables bigger and broader ecosystems, including a digital marketplace of device and an application partner eco-system. This enables revenue generation even for non-national mobile operators.

Maintaining a wireless network is complicated. Moving from Wi-Fi to cellular can be a significant learning curve for an organisation which may have agriculture, healthcare or manufacturing rather than IT as its core capability. The solution is to keep it simple. Fully automated deployment and management provide a ‘single pane of glass’ view of all solution components, manage network resources, network topology, remote monitoring, service assurance and diagnostics.

End-to-end distributed cloud-based capabilities with fast on-boarding and reliability allow investment to grow, beginning with an all-inclusive starter kit.

Closer to home in the UK, Ofcom has auctioned Shared Spectrum / Access Licences in the 1800MHz, 2300MHz, 3.8-4.2GHz and 26GHz bands to enable local licensing – where we have already started seeing deployments being kicked-off. The ideal goal would be to ensure that automate Dynamic Spectrum Access, an equivilent of SAS, which Ofcom themselves have considered in the consultations of the Shared Access licensing is also implemented sooner rather than later to facilitate more efficient sharing of spectrum.

Mavenir is an Award-Winning Innovator - Mavenir’s 5G-ready Open Virtualised RAN solution (Open vRAN) has won awards and recognition around the world.

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

DCMS-supported 5G Trials

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VER THE LAST FIVE YEARs, the 34 DCMS-funded Testbeds & Trials projects have tended to be charted by the cohort in which they have been awarded. But you get a much better view of just how broad the programme is if you look

at the geographical and vertical market spread of the projects. For the first time, we’ve plotted them out. Some projects span more than one sector or location and that is shown here.

Traditionally, new technologies are implemented first in major conurbations, with the use cases developed around those

locations. By building use cases along different lines, from industrial to rural and from healthcare to logistics, we’ve seen a greater diversity of use for 5G, and deployments from Dorset in the south to Shetland in the north.

Each fosters the ecosystem and builds a 5G future.

RURAL PROJECTS

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You can bet your life on 5G Standalone

Ultra reliable connectivity is a key benefit of Standalone, the next generation of 5G that delivers advanced services and will transform the UK’s economy and society

T

he United Kingdom and indeed the world, is faced with some of the most significant challenges in its history. The climate crisis, economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19 and digital inequality all loom large.

The answers to these generational problems are not yet clear. What is clear, however, is that every conceivable technology-led solution will rely on advanced connectivity. For so long an unsung bedrock of our economic and societal growth, the last few years have thrown the importance of connectivity into sharp focus. Moving forward, deploying next-generation connectivity – specifically 5G – will be vital in securing a sustainable, equal, prosperous society.

Standalone Vs non-Standalone It is important to make a distinction when it comes to 5G. To date, 5G as we know it has first and foremost been a consumerfacing technology. Coverage, handsets and offerings have all revolved around mobile users. This is just the first stage, and it’s not where we’ll see the technology’s full potential. That will come

with the imminent arrival of the second phase of 5G – Standalone.

The 5G networks you can connect to today on your handset is made possible because operators have combined existing 4G infrastructure with newer 5G technology, bolting 5G onto an existing all-important ‘core’, the brains of the network.

Known as Non-Standalone, this approach brings advantages, particularly in how quickly it allows operators to roll out wide 5G coverage. But it also brings limitations, with many of the most exciting features of 5G not yet available.

Standalone 5G (SA), boasts the characteristics we think of as truly next generation, including instant response times, ultra-low latency, rock-solid reliability and enhanced coverage. These characteristics unlock transformative 5G use cases. This is made possible by pairing 5G radios with a new architecture of 5G core network, based on Cloud Native implementation, which boosts network capacity and makes networks more efficient and easier to operate.

While the UK has lagged behind leading countries such as the US and China when it comes to 5G deployment to date,

Real World Standalone Ericsson and Vodafone, working with Qualcomm, MediaTek and OPPO have deployed the UK’s first live 5G Standalone network at Coventry University.

The network will be used to trial virtual reality learning to help train student nurses and allied health professionals. Through virtual and augmented reality, they will explore the human body like never before – from the intricacies of the brain to following red blood cells as they course through veins. A professor can access any part of the body during a lesson, make specific points to students – with no lag – go back over sections students need more information on and answer their questions in real-time. “I can put the headset on and 5G allows the learner to access high-resolution images and videos remotely, anywhere in the world, and they are able to ask questions in real time,” says Dr. Natasha Taylor, an associate professor at Coventry University’s Faculty of Health and Life Sciences.

Ericsson 5G Radio Dot small cells have also been installed to provide speedy and high-capacity indoor coverage in the university’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab and National Transport Design Centre. The architecture enables a set of technological capabilities not possible before, such as multi-access edge computing which brings computing power closer to the user, meaning even faster speeds and quicker response times across the campus.

Professor John Latham CBE, Coventry University Vice-Chancellor, says: “This will help us continue to change and enhance the way students learn. Being the first university in the UK to have this next phase of 5G technology is the first step on our journey to creating a 5G campus.”

Standalone gives the country an opportunity to lead. Already, the country’s operators are looking to move forward with BT, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile O2 all partnering with Ericsson to deploy their critical Standalone 5G cores.

Standalone puts critical comms in good health

It’s only when you get into specific applications that the potential impact really hits home. “Ultra-reliable and low latency communication means reliability of 99.9999 per cent – six nines!” Andrea Spaccapietra, VP Digital Services UK and Ireland at Ericsson, explains. “One packet in a million may need to be retransmitted.”

“And that means that you can bet your life on it.”

In fact, that’s exactly what the medical profession is exploring, in partnership with Ericsson, where the combination of low-latency and reliability has been used to demo remote robotic surgery performed miles away over a 5G network.

But imagine the possibilities for low latency beyond healthcare. Nearinstantaneous machine-to-machine communication on a factory floor,

Bonn test involved two end-to-end network slices: a default mobile broadband slice and a cloud VR gamingoptimized slice. The gaming slice was configured to enable high throughput and stable low latency, while providing resource isolation between the two slices.

Spaccapietra gives fleet management as an instance where such an approach would be useful. “Services will want to track different parts of the load, the driver and the vehicle. People who are interested in a particular shipment or the fleet operator can go to a portal and request connectivity. Using software interfaces, the mobile network can create an ecosystem of partner applications.”

Ultra-reliable and low latency communication means reliability of 99.9999 per cent – six nines!

connected autonomous vehicles transmitting to one another while driving at speed, millions of sensors in farms talking to one another and adapting to weather conditions in real-time… The number of industries and applications for Standalone 5G are virtually endless.

Manufacturing a case for Standalone and slicing

Ultra-low latency and increased reliability are just two sample characteristics of 5G Standalone, but its huge potential is underpinned by mixing and matching an array of advantages.

One scenario Spaccapietra outlines is the creation of a digital twin by a manufacturer. “You can create a virtual but credible replica of a manufacturing line where those running a factory can simulate how changes in machine settings or product mix would affect performance in real-time. You can run realistic scenarios and troubleshoot.”

This needs a number of elements only made possible by Standalone 5G: the ability to collect a large amount of data (bandwidth) in real time (speed) and rendering the replica near instantaneously

(low latency) so that when you interact with it, it feels real. Spaccapietra sees numerous applications for this. “We can see how Standalone 5G can drive automation in manufacturing. We can also show how you can build smart warehouses, which optimise the collection and storage of goods.”

Often in such a use case, a manufacturer will elect to create a private Standalone 5G network and implement network slicing. A private network is a completely dedicated one tailored to a specific set of needs, used only by a single company or plant. Network slicing divides a network into sub-networks connected by a shared infrastructure, with each sub-network, or ‘slice’ designed to serve a defined business purpose.

Ericsson has led in developing mobile network slicing from proof-of-concept to implementation. Spaccapietra cites work Ericsson has done working with Deutsche Telekom and Samsung to complete the world’s first 5G end-to-end network slicing trial at Deutsche Telekom’s Bonn lab.

Using an unmodified Samsung S21 handset tethered to a VR headset, the

UK leadership means seizing the Standalone 5G future

Spaccapietra’s examples are enough to spark the imagination. What could the UK’s innovators and world-leading businesses create using 5G Standalone as a platform? What could our Government and councils gain by connecting rural communities? What advancements could our scientists and environmentalists make?

Answers to these questions, and the benefits that come with them will only be found if the country accelerates its 5G Standalone development quickly. Some areas will be of critical importance if the UK is to be a 5G leader, such as UK Government and industry collaboration to continue with projects and pilots like the 5G Testbeds & Trials, but this time these can be strictly more focused on unlocking the benefits of standalone 5G. There is also the need to prioritise the roll-out of high-performing 5G networks in the present and close the UK’s connectivity gaps; too many people and communities remain unconnected and risk being left behind.

And finally, the key ingredient of success is the UK putting connectivity at the heart of its future infrastructure plans, recognising the importance of this long unheralded but vital aspect of our lives.

It’s clear that while 5G has been with us for a few years now, we’ve not even scratched the surface of its potential.

The advent of Standalone makes these last few years a prologue in the technology’s lifecycle. What comes next promises to be incredibly exciting for the country and a tantalising opportunity to lead the world into a brighter future.

Discover the power of Ericsson 5G at www.ericsson.com/5g

SUNGHYUN CHOI SAMSUNG

MISCHA DOHLER ERICSSON

6g

DEAN BUBLEY DISRUPTIVE ANALYSIS

MEHDI BENNIS UNIVERSITY OF OULU

DAN WARREN SAMSUNG RESEARCH

STEFAN PARKVALL ERICSSON

Portraits Benjamin Barrow Portanier

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W H AT H A P P E N S N E X T

The telecoms world never sleeps – or stops thinking about what comes next. Although little more than two years have elapsed since the first UK 5G networks were switched on, there’s already a widespread and lively debate about what might constitute its successor, 6G. A decade away, the performance targets, technologies and everyday uses that will be commonplace in a 6G world are all up for discussion today. Refreshingly, the debate this time is tinged with some introspection about what we learned from 5G. Andrew Orlowski looks at the ambition, the technology and whether 6G may happen, or should even happen, at all.

W

HILE THE

mobile industry has provided the inventions and the infrastructure that have transformed modern life, it cannot boast a great record for anticipating consumer applications and services those networks use. For example, when Parliament debated the Wireless Telegraphy Bill in 1997, UMTS, what became 3G, it heard Lord Clinton-Davis, the Minister of State for DTI explain “novel and flexible features such as the possibility of direct communication with computers. It will make use of both terrestrial and satellite telephone links”.

That year, in her preface to the Government’s Multimedia Communications on the Move paper www.bit.ly/32r58aw, the then Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry - Barbara Roche anticipated that 3G “offers the exciting prospect of full interactive multimedia capabilities with highspeed mobile access to a wide range of entertainment and information services.”

These included “full mobile office services” and “real-time video”. All at two megabits per second.

As we now know, it was another sixteen years before 4G supported services as a mobile office and mobile video streaming in a way that consumers could use with confidence. But 4G also benefited from a huge stroke of luck that nobody in the telecoms industry had foreseen to stimulate the demand side. Social networking services, in the form of Facebook and

Instagram, made the migration from an activity a few people did in the evening, on a laptop PC, to something many more people did continuously throughout the day, on a mobile device. And that was in large part thanks to an outsider, Apple driving up the usability of mobile devices to create something a mass market could use without pain. 5G has failed to ignite demand on the consumer for any new application, largely because that leap has already been made.

The oft-repeated consumer use cases for 5G such as mobile surgery and augmented reality have become hackneyed through repetition. But that doesn’t stop 6G hypesters dangling even more ambitious applications before our eyes.

Some of this is ‘like 5G, but more so.’ In a presentation at Samsung’s annual developer conference in October, Sunghyun Choi, corporate senior vice president at Samsung Electronics described how full hologram interactions might emerge on 6G devices, 4K or 8K interactive video streams. Transfer speeds on 6G may need to reach 1Tbps or fifty times the peak 5G speed at frequencies of up to 3,000GHz. “By 2035, 6G will usher in the ability to send wireless signals at the rate of human computation,” the NYU Tandon professor of electrical and computer engineering Theodore S. Rappaport has predicted. Dubbed ‘wireless cognition’ by researchers, 6G could mean that human intelligence could eventually be sent over the air instantaneously,” Rappaport says.

And Mischa Dohler, the former King’s Professor who is now at Ericsson, imagines networks designing their own protocols. “Personally, the most disruptive

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things in 6G and beyond will be the machine-generated services. We’ll have a lot more AI in the network. And over the network. These could include protocols that design themselves, he speculates, although most others are more cautious about how realistic this is,” he suggests.

“We will transit from a world of very discrete human designed services, to a world of continuous spectrum - some will come and go in milliseconds” Dohler goes further, and sees machine learning creating its own network. “We have reached a flexibility of network design so AI can design its own services” Not all academics buy this vision, and are ready to be transported to wireless utopia just yet. One widely read post last year by Dr Mehdi Bennis, an Associate Professor of Wireless Communications at the University of Oulu in Finland specialising in 5G and 6G technologies, lamented the state of the early 6G hype. “From the staggering number of 6G vision papers appearing in ArXIV and IEEE on a daily basis, one cannot fail to realize that our level of novelty is inversely proportional to the number of 6G contributions.” Dr Bennis wrote. “Despite all 6G visions, panels and white papers over the last two to three years, including the ones my colleagues, collaborators and I contributed to, the overwhelming consensus is that we are still looking for the WOW moment.”

VISTING THE VIRTUAL METAVERSE

One recent application that has caught the attention of the press is Facebook’s Metaverse – a vision of how businesses and individuals might interact in the future, using augmented reality and virtual reality. To emphasise how important it thinks it is, the company has rebranded itself Meta Facebook is just another company under the Meta umbrella now. “The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims. Others have plans for metaverses too - including Nvidia, Autodesk, and Microsoft. And as The Protocol records, “there are plans for a fashion metaverse, an industrial metaverse, a fashion metaverse, an industrial metaverse, an entertainment metaverse,

a gaming metaverse, a shark metaverse and many others.”

Whether any fare better than Second Life, the virtual reality environment that was briefly hyped in the mid-2000s, is open to question. And before you get too excited, as perennial realist Dean Bubley of Disruptive

Analysis notes, https://www.linkedin.com/ pulse/metaverse-killer-app-5g-dean-bubley almost all the metaverse demonstrations so far involve a static experience.

“The more immersive a technology is and especially if it’s VR rather than AR based - the more likely people will take part while

We started designing 3G when the internet wasn’t around, and 4G when the smartphone wasn’t invented.

seated, or at least not while walking around an outdoor environment with obstacles and dangers. Most gaming, and most business collaboration takes places indoors too,” Bubley writes. “And indoor environments tend to have particular ways that connectivity is delivered to devices.

Generally, Wi-Fi tends to be used a lot, as the access points are themselves indoors, at the end of broadband connection or office local area network.”

Dohler doesn’t seem phased that the mobile world isn’t Metaverse ready just yet.

“From a generational point of view, we have always introduced the next generation years ahead of time. We started designing 3G when the internet wasn’t around, and 4G when the smartphone wasn’t invented.

We’ve done 5G without having a fully immersive AR/VR system”,” says Dohler. “We are following these fairly solid trends”.

Certainly, both capacity and response times will need to exceed anything that networks are capable of now, as anything with haptic feedback requires much lower latencies. That’s because our nervous

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W H AT H A P P E N S N E X T

systems process touch so much faster than visual signals. Audio requires a 100ms response time, visual 10ms, and touch around 1ms. Current head mounted displays gobble through 100Mb a second, giving a limited 3D experience. Constraining this may cause eye strain and nausea.

Mobile applications will always lag behind the best showpiece desktop demonstrations in any case: the graphics processing unit on a mobile is around 1/40th of the power of a desktop GPU. Don’t expect full VR via mobile networks just yet.

Maybe 6G will do what 4G did for social networking, and take such applications mobile. But plans to address such challenges are underway. How mobile networks crack such issues is an area to which we now turn.

THE TECH TARGETS

In a sense, describing the next generation technology ought to be the easier part of the prediction. ‘Better’ means capacity, more speed, more power efficiency, lower latency, as Dr Choi outlined above. That’s been the

traditional evolution of a network. But fulfilling these pledges takes technology into new ground. Early discussions of 6G see ambitions to push into parts of the spectrum hitherto unused by wireless radio, making use of terahertz frequencies, for example.

Here, hard physical limits are being reached, scientists acknowledge.

“Some things like the fundamental laws of physics are being challenged,” notes Samsung Research’s Director of Advanced Networks Dan Warren, pointing out this necessarily happens with each new generation.

Profound problems also arise at such extremes of physics. Many are outlined in an IEEE paper co-authored by Dohler and other leading researchers,6G Wireless Systems: Vision, Requirements, Challenges, Insights, and Opportunities.

“The high EM losses in the terahertz frequency bands pose a tremendous research and engineering challenge,” the authors note. The authors don’t shy from the challenges.

“Everything revolves around spectrum,”

explains Mischa Dohler. “Maxwell Equations, that’s the limiting factor. We’re moving from Ghz to Teraherz systems. We have challenges around the electronics.”

In addition, 5G, which was more ambitious than previous generations, was complicated by becoming less focused on meeting hard goals.

“With each new generation,” Samsung Research’s Warren explains, “a significant portion was devoted to fixing the previous G, and to driving to one single KPI (key performance indicator), such as data.”

“So from 2G to 4G generally there was a step change in data rate, and a step change in latency. In the 3G to 4G migration what got solved was taking a twin technology network (circuit switched for voice and packet switched for data) and putting it in one IP domain that needed not only bandwidth, but which also had to be lower latency to meet requirements for interactive voice. That was the big challenge in 4G.” Then things got more complicated – and hard targets replaced by hopes.

“4G to 5G was much more an

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aspirational punt to a certain extent. That means KPIs were speculative, and require a business case which may never be seen.”

To land performance and capacity wins for 5G technology, the industry did two things. It amped up the power, which means that a 5G site consumes far more energy than a 4G site, and more are needed to fulfil the coverage promises. But it also developed clever new technologies such as beamforming, which points the antennas to where the devices are, this brings down the power requirement. However, this is one area where the gains made in 5G are not readily transferrable.

“At terahertz frequencies, beam forming becomes really difficult to do,” says Warren.

Warren explains that in a beam forming array three antenna units may be arranged pointing out with a beam of 120 degrees.

Greater range can be achieved by using higher frequencies, but there’s an inverse square at work: if you double the frequency, then range is reduced.

One way around that is to use a narrower beam, and try and point a beam at specific users, and track them, then try to synchronise the beams.

“When you’ve narrowed the beam down to a pencil beam you can’t cover massive areas. It’s a really significant problem. And as a result, if people move unexpectedly, the beam gets lost. To make terahertz frequencies usable in a meaningful way for a mobile service is a big challenge.”

File that under NIY: or not invented yet.

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OFFINS ACKNOWLEDGE THAT

old architectures are no longer applicable – so 6G may be an opportunity for fundamentally rethink some aspects of network design.

One example: physical layer (PHY) techniques are being discussed, so applications which require very low turnaround trip time, such as tactile and haptic controls, become feasible.

Some robotics applications will also require those very short round trip times.

“Current work is identifying use cases and discussing possible PHY level solutions,” the authors confirm in their paper.

This is also an opportunity to remove network features and designs that are no longer needed or applicable.

“Unknown to many, the transport (and attached core network functionalities) is, in fact, a legacy artifact; we do have it in 5G because we had it in 4G,we have it in 4G because we had it in 3G, and likewise 2G, and the reason it was introduced in 2G is because, back then, the Internet was not able to provide the required QoS” Dohler et al note.

Another touted scenario for high bandwidth networking not envisaged today may be chip-to-chip communications, where radio communications replaces wired links.

A network of sensors of cheap devices or a ‘nanonetwork’, is one example. This is defined as where data rates exceed 10010,00Gb/s.

Another use case is “shower kiosks” have

Cognitive Networks are using AI to make them run more smoothly, I should have a template instead of 2,000 parameters

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been touted for deployment in malls, transport stations, or other public venues, that preform two functions: an information kiosk and backhaul for mmWave, data that can receive up to 1Tb/s. Reality intrudes again here: “coexistence with contemporaneous cellular services and security seems to be the major issue requiring further attention in this direction”, the authors note.

New modulation methods, by which signals negotiate the spectrum, traditionally mark out a move from one generation to the next but they are reaching their limits.

Dohler et al note that the digital transmission method that enabled both 4G and 5G orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, or OFDM isn’t future proof OFDM splits a single information stream into several closely spaced subchannel frequencies. But what replaces it? Here discussion is lively.

One candidate is IFDM, or Instantaneous Frequency-division Multiplexing (IFDM), Dohler et al note that “IFDM is sensitive to frequency dispersion, reduced spectral efficiency “due to the cyclic prefix” and high peak to average power ration (PAPR).

Research so far has been scant, because the physical problems are so overwhelming.

Absorption is a real challenge at high frequencies, where mist or leaves interrupt a signal. But this is where the WiFi and mobile industries must find answers.

“The high EM losses in the terahertz frequency bands pose a tremendous research and engineering challenge,” Warren confirms.

Work to identify the gaps in the science needed are also part of the Hexa-X project https://hexa-x.eu/deliverables/ funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, for example.

And where will the spectrum come from?

The World Radio Conference of 2023 is set address this for 6G. This will discuss how to allocate the 140-350Ghz “high mmWaves” and then even higher – up to 1Thz and beyond, although perhaps not for 6G. “Free space optical including IR, either through LEDs .

But not everything needs to be invented from scratch. Incremental progress may yet yield dividends, simply from applying well known techniques to the infrastructure. The AI doesn’t have to be super-intelligent, merely useful.

W H AT H A P P E N S N E X T

Some things like the fundamental laws of physics are being challenged.At terahertz frequencies, beam forming becomes really difficult to do. File that under NIY: or not invented yet

“Cognitive Networks are using AI to make them run more smoothly,” explains Ericsson’s Stefan Parkvall.

“Ideally, I should have some template instead of 2,000 parameters to tune, I should be able to add an IoT box to my network, and then the AI figures out how to tweak the parameters and continue to retune and improve. That kind of abstraction has not been done before and we’d do work under that” he explains.

Another innovation that isn’t headlinegrabbing, but could prove very useful, are zero energy devices that harvest energy from the environment. There is no need to replace a battery – for there is no battery.

Such devices instead glean energy from the surroundings such as solar energy, temperature differences, radio waves or vibrations.

“The amount of harvested energy is small; hence the data rate is low but definitely sufficient for (low-end) IoT devices,” Parkvall says.

And an unplanned factor for mobile operators will be the proliferation of satellite networks, with, the economics of mass production finally reaching space. These are constellations of low-cost units orbiting much lower than conventional fixed earth orbit satellites. Starlink has 12,000 already approved by US regulator the FCC. Operators will be able to take advantage for backhaul, although it is also a commercial threat to 6G, providing a household’s broadband means less time will be spent on the mobile network.

HARD REALITY CHECK

Experts warn that 6G may happen very differently.

Rather than one big bang the telecoms world is been upended by new deployment models.

“We may not see an explicit “6G” in the way we’ve had 5G and 4G,” says one.

Indeed, if 5G eventually fulfils its promises, delivering “a flexible, software oriented, dynamic sliced network”, as Samsung’s Warren suggests, then a gradual, incrementalist implementation will be more suitable in a decade.

“6G might start as a niche. It might be a software update, compartmentalised away from the rest of the network. And you do it in a warehouse or a small area then grows and builds.”

Investment economics is also likely to drive networks to a more gradualist approach. This is what Stephen Howard of Communications Chambers, a consultancy advising on telecoms, media and technology, who was previously head of HSBC’s global TMT equity team, warns.

“If we think that telecommications infrastructure is an economic enabler, and important to society, then we should be in a world where operators lifting their capital expenditure budgets were positively rewarded. That would seem to me be the optimal situation. Very often we see precisely the opposite.”

Today he points out, network operators are punished for announcing new capital expenditure on their networks. “There’s a

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disconnect between broader policy that is adamant that all this stuff is existentially important to the economy, and the actual economic rewards of undertaking this activity.”

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F OPERATORS CAN’T MAKE MONEY,

then the best laid plans will remain on the table, unimplemented, Howard warns. “Ultimately if the industry cannot generate returns sufficient to satisfy investors, then everyone ends up suffering. It may look like a specifically industry problem – one affecting only the operator or the equipment vendor - but actually, in due course, it becomes everybody’s problem. If the operators can’t upgrade as much as they should, ultimately that feeds through to the resources available for the research and development. It feeds through to the quality of the network coverage, the capacity and the provision.”

“And I’m afraid that if the technology isn’t answering real world use requirements, then ultimately that is going to show up in a slower place of progress.”

Howard backs moving to a more incrementalist approach. So we’d get a 5G Plus. Then Plus Plus.

He’s one of several sources who voiced support for a more modular approach to next generation technologies than another round of next-G hype.

Warren echoes these views. As each G came and went, hard specifications were augmented by wishful thinking. Many of the KPIs written into 5G were

RESEARCH ON 6G TECHNOLOGY COMPONENTS 6G SYSTEMATIZATION RESEARCH PROJECTS HORIZON EUROPE. SMART NETWORKS & SERVICES

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Initial 5G/NR

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5G/NR evolution

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TIMELINE Dates when we will see 6G are still highly speculative but Spectrum allocation is drven by the World Radiocommunication Conference held every four years TECH, TRENDS & VISION DOCUMENT

speculative, and require a business case – one which may never arrive. “You need a business case for one million devices in one square kilometre - you need backhaul and a revenue model around that,” is one example.

“Similarly, a Five Nines target requires lots of redundant equipment, and this is a capex issue because of all that redundancy. While for 100 per cent coverage, you need base stations in fields where people go. That may be completely non profitable.”

Howard agrees that better performance indicators would be more useful to network users than what we may call ‘G-ness’.

“The problem with any new technology generation is that the technology evolution path it enables stuff in a very binary way. It invites us to ask: “What is your 6G capability here? Or there? Or in this context?”

“More generic measures of what the industry really does, which is capacity

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REQUIREMENTS & EVALUATION CRITERIAS

provision, could be more useful. I’d like to see what gigabytes or terabytes are being and the unit prices of that provision. Let’s monitor that, rather than some arbitrary standard,” Howard explains.

“Until we’ve got 5G singing as a B2B proposition that operators and business customers can be confident in, it’s a bit premature to talk about 6G.” thinks Warren.

The operators need to establish their business credentials in the coming years, with 5G, before they can take 6G to the bank.

That’s a whole new world for them, Warren notes: “When the network goes down you and me might turn our phones on and off and swear or go outside. But when a service requirement is not being fulfilled for a business, people on start to look at how much they can sue the mobile operator for.

That becomes part of a very different

Transfer speeds on 6G may need to reach 1Tbps or fifty times the peak 5G speed at frequencies of up to 3,000GHz

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TECHNICAL STANDARDISATION COMMERCIALISATION SPECIFICATION

dynamic to how contacts are written. The biggest stopping point for 5G in new use cases in B2B is that the operators haven’t got the risk appetite to take that on, or the confidence in their service to agree that kind of contract”.

So if there’s no 6G it may be for a very good reason. Incremental, modular, experiments by operators will replace hype industry. What hits the market is proven and useful. And virtuous circle of investment again.

On what it calls a tentative timeline, Ericsson envisages the speculation phase discussing trends and vision to run into 2023.

By 2024 we should see a few years in which these requirements and evaluations are finalised. By 2026 3GPP’s technical standardisation comes into play. With commercialisation by around 2030.

Take your meds!

Almost half of the people given life-saving prescription medication don’t take it.

A new remote medication administration monitoring system is changing that.

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USINESSES LIKE TO USE

technology to remove humans from the loop by automating their customer services. Corporate accountants love it, as it saves money, but the proliferation of automated telephone and internet services, and more recently chatbots, mean it can be frustrating to find a real person to solve a problem. By contrast, a British telemedicine company is bucking the trend by using technology to increase human attention on a problem, rather than decrease it - with great success.

The problem has astronomical costs for health services world-wide: people just aren’t taking their prescription pills, and the costs involved are astonishing. 55 per cent of asthmatics, 68 per cent of epileptics, and most remarkably of all, 43 per cent of cancer patients stop taking the medication that they’ve been prescribed. The health care term for this is ‘non-adherence’, and while a small part of the reason for this is forgetfulness, much more is voluntary non-compliance.

“We have a non-adherence crisis. It’s costing about two to three billion a year,” says Medication Support MD Norman Niven, who has been developing products to tackle the adherence problem for thirty years since he was a care director at BUPA. “In the United States, where their health budget is $1.8 trillion, nonadherence is costing about $600 billion a year.”

It was Niven who developed Nomad, the most widely used medication dispensing system in the UK adopted by over 3,000 pharmacies, at an earlier company of his, Surgichem.

“What frequently happens when people stop taking their prescribed medication is that the health outcome is a hospital admission. And when they come out of hospital, they stop taking their medicines again,” he explains.

Setting up a patient’s support network is in itself expensive. And as the figures suggest, far from comprehensive: the current system has enough holes in the net for non-adherence to become routine. In addition, mistakes are commonplace in our atomised health system – Niven recalls a recent example of a patient leaving hospital had a bag full of medicine to take, plus a letter detailing what to take, and a list - and all three were different.

EASING GP WORKLOAD Niven’s new system Paman is a remote monitoring kit with clinicians at the other end of a video chat link, staffed from 7am to 8:30pm, although it operates longer for Parkinson’s sufferers. It comprises a network dongle and a box, called a Medihub, the latter establishing the direct video link to a pharmacist. It’s a simple installation, taking three minutes to plug in and activate. This doesn’t require the patient to have broadband already installed at home – something that older patients may not have.

The system must replace four daily visits, and manage the re-ordering and approval that takes up a GP’s time. That adds up to a large amount of manual paperwork. Interactive medication administration charts developed by PAMAN manage all these processes automatically in real time. Paman does this for under £7 a day.

The first trial in Liverpool has demonstrated impressive results, with

The crisis is costing the NHS £2bn to £3bn a year

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R E M O T E H E A LT H C A R E

adherence rising from the 43 per cent to 98 per cent, saving £250,000. This translates into a potential £3 billion to £4 billion savings nationwide. Hospital admissions are reduced, and it’s also taken the workload off GPs. “Paman demonstrates that the nonadherence problem is solvable and not that difficult, and at the end of the day you are able to transfer the savings into other areas, like social care,” says Niven.

“The support network can take quite a while for social services to set up, which is one

reason why discharge takes so long. But this is much faster: we managed to discharge one patient into the community saving six hospital days alone.”

Niven’s long experience has taught him that recognising human agency is key to the success. Patients initiate the video exchange with the pharmacist, in response to an alert, and that choice gives them a deeper sense of engagement.

“They need to press the button to start talking, and if they don’t, we ain’t going to see them,” explains Niven. “They’re totally in control of the interaction.”

“We arrive on time at exactly the same time, and not three hours late. We find they chat and ask us questions. It’s technology with a heart,” he says.

The reason for deliberate non-adherence is also a matter of stubborn free will asserting itself.

“It’s remarkable that people don’t take medication when they’ve got very serious conditions. You’d think taking your medicine is as simple as taking a vaccine for Covid. But the problem is that when you take a medicine, you don’t feel any different,” says Niven.

There are exceptions.

“Painkillers have a high adherence - they feel the difference immediately, and HIV patients do too, as the cocktail allows them to live another day. But for many other people, the ego comes into it. They reason that ‘I’ve managed to do without those tablets today so I’m not going to take them tomorrow. If I can get away with those bloody meds and don’t rely on then I get my independence back.”

Paman currently uses 4G, but the company applied to join the DCMS WAVE 2 5G Testbed within the Liverpool’s Kensington District, a redevelopment area. The first site going live on the communiy centre. The network hosts the largest 5G millimetre wave mesh in the UK, and the second largest in the world, delivering WiFi-like hotspots.

“It worked really well,” says Niven, “although we did have problems with tree branches as it’s a line-of-sight network.” The potential for savings to Liverpool’s local NHS is £2.5 million a year, and it’s rolling out to nearby Knowsley too.

The company is both enhancing Paman and adding specialist functions. It has developed a new sensory Paman package for patients who have hearing or eyesight impairment, and this has demonstrated a similar uptake in medication adherence, says

NORMAN NIVEN

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LIVERPOOL The thinking behind Liverpool’s 5G network was that Health and Social care are too important to leave in the hands of the mobile network operators.

The city was awarded one of the first six 5G Testbeds and Trials projects. The clear benefits for the community were evident, and led to Liverpool winning a 5G Create slot.

This was one of the first sites in the UK to deploy Ofcom’s Band 77 shared access licence spectrum. In the light of Covid lockdown and the use of the network for home education, Ofcom took into account exceptional circumstances in granting a licence.

Liverpool’s deprived area of “Kenny” just south of Anfield is a very different place to the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is an urban environment with a lot of long terraces of houses, which present a particular challenge for radio planning. The project developed custom ray-tracing based software to plan the locations of radio cells.

The equipment, from Oxfordshire based Cable Free, makes it a pioneering Band 77 5G standalone private network, linked with technology from Blu Wireless. Both the University of Liverpool and John Hopkins University have worked with Liverpool Council to roll out the system. Support and core software has come from Telet Research.

While most projects have started with the technology and then looked for the application, Liverpool is different. It started with the problem and used 5G Technology to solve it.

Niven. It’s also developed a special support service: for people with issues such as diabetes, where the patient’s blood sugar levels are monitored with a glucometer, and the system can re-tritate the dose with insulin.

It can manage a patient’s blood pressure too.

With taxation increasing as a share of GDP to pay for the NHS, finding cost savings is a political priority. And this technology could ultimately save lives.

Making 5G connectivity ubiquitous: is the answer in space?

Don’t wait for a universal public 5G network to take advantage of 5G’s transformative applications.

I

ncreasingly, enterprises are choosing to set up their own private 5G networks so that they can leverage the benefits of 5G within their own ‘four walls’.

They’re using real-time connectivity to unlock the latest generation of internet of things (IoT) technologies, intelligent video analytics, augmented reality experiences, autonomous and remote operations, interaction with mission-critical machine and industrial processes and so much more.

However, these private networks don’t operate in isolation, and need connectivity that spreads beyond the ‘bubble’ of their immediate surroundings.

The smart factory needs to send data to its HQ. The oil rig worker using a live video feed to show an issue to experts based on the mainland, needs real-time direction to fix the fault. The IoT sensors on a remote electricity substation need constant central monitoring.

But how do you provide connectivity in areas where existing mobile networks don’t reach? This is where satellite technology comes in, bridging the gaps where terrestrial connectivity has yet to go or just can’t go, or delivering a resilient second strand of connectivity.

How satellites complement 5G The rise of 5G is being accompanied by broader availability of non-terrestrial

networks. More and more, the answer to supporting innovative business transformation will lie in a hybrid 5G-satellite network.

Satellites are an ideal way to serve areas with a population density too low to justify a cellular service because the constellation coverage is available immediately without the need to deploy terrestrial infrastructure. The infrastructure for hybrid 5G networks already exists.

The next step is to visualise the possibilities, so here are four core benefits a hybrid network could have for your business.

Connecting the remote to the core Satellites can connect even the most remote 5G private network to the internet or to the business’s core functionality.

Edge computing, programmed and monitored centrally over satellite, can be deployed to facilitate sending key data via the same connectivity path.

Alternatively, a range of edge processing and decision functions can be controlled centrally to facilitate low-latency mission critical operations.

Imagine a military base in the middle of the desert that has sophisticated perimeter defences. Its private 5G network takes high-quality video from its CCTV cameras and uses edge processing to run image recognition software locally when it spots someone approaching the fence. But there’s no one on the base qualified to grant the visitor access, so an image is sent via satellite back to HQ for authentication. This is equally applicable to any remote critical national

infrastructure installation that needs a high-speed network locally and low-latent connectivity back to an operations centre.

Efficient, seamless mobile connectivity A hybrid 5G network can enable seamless connectivity, where the user won’t notice their device switching between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. Combining the two sounds simple, but it requires complex calculations to make sure the moving antenna is pointed at the right satellite at the right moment.

At CGI, we’re developing this technology to create a hybrid 5G network for use on trains. Working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), our Satellites fOr Digitalisation Of Railways (SODOR) project will go live next year, aggregating 3G, 4G and 5G networks. With SODOR, trains will be able to flag up issues to central managers

network can switch seamlessly to satellite at the first sign of difficulty. We’re already seeing utilities companies, for example, using satellites in combination with other connectivity sources to maintain a constant flow of information about the state of their infrastructure in rural locations. Plus, in areas that are subject to volatile governance and political instability that can threaten access, having a satellite link that’s far harder to disrupt than terrestrial connectivity, can be a smart resilience choice.

See the future for yourself

immediately – from life critical information, like derailments to more mundane matters, like notifications of track conditions and their impact on the train’s maintenance requirements. Plus, passengers won’t experience coverage black spots.

A connectivity extender without restrictions A hybrid 5G network has the power to extend 5G connectivity reliably beyond the boundaries of terrestrial infrastructure to anywhere in the world – including the middle of the ocean, which could transform the IoT-enabled global supply chain. Although there are currently some solutions that use satellite to track valuable cargos outside the range of terrestrial networks, they’re limited.

Increasingly, supply chains will need the greater capability that a 5G network will bring. 5G Massive Machine Type Communications can support up to one

million devices per square kilometre, compared to 4,000 for 4G. So a hybrid 5G network will be able to monitor every sensitive container wherever it is in the world, checking, for example, their temperature, whether anyone has opened them, or whether anything has been removed or added. Ports will be able to have up-to-date logistical information that can help them prepare to receive a cargo and minimise the amount of valuable time it has to spend waiting to unload or move on aboard an HGV.

A resilient second strand In many industries real-time monitoring is essential to delivering always-on services.

If there’s an issue, the decision-making core needs to know about it almost instantly and there’s no room for connectivity to fail. The satellite connectivity of a hybrid 5G network can be a valuable resilient back-up to terrestrial communications and the

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Knowing the unknown unknowns Illustrations Pat Higgins

 phiggins80

After covid, the world looks a more uncertain place. Andrew Orlowski looks at the strategic global threats to the telecoms industry, and the steps Governments are taking to mitigate them.

I

N THE 21ST CENTURY, THE TELECOMS

industry became globalised – and a global success. But few things can be taken for granted. Today the world looks a very different place. The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how restarting the global engines of production is far from easy, with labour shortages and a microprocessor drought lingering into next year. Cyber-attacks have crippled supply chains. An increasingly confrontational China is perceived to be threatening neighbours.

Since it embraced global markets, China has focused on what is called economic statecraft, in Chinese: jingji waijiao, the use of trade and business to achieve foreign policy goals. So what else lies on the horizon?

CHINESE CHIP SHOPS

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hina’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in December 2001 was a prelude to fierce competition and enormous growth. Today, that’s more of a cause for concern. Not only have supply chains have been disrupted by trade issues, but China’s long-term strategic focus on science and technology is causing governments to seek a Plan B. “They’re clearly pioneering in a number of areas and the West is lagging behind,” notes David Rogers MBE, CEO of Copperhorse chair of the mobile industry’s GSMA Fraud and Security Group, and an advisor to DCMS. “For crucial technologies, where is the clever stuff

going on? A lot of it is China domestic based.

They’re building a huge skills base of people and techniques. They’ve reached that level of maturity” For decades Western microprocessor producers were content to outsource manufacturing to Asian suppliers, closing facilities in the US and Europe. The United States today has only a 12 per cent share of chip manufacturing. China, by contrast, has invested around $120 billion in production with a target to reach 70 percent selfsufficiency in semiconductors by 2025. While it still lags behind some state of the art areas, with the more forceful stance of China, that outsourcing has created a huge strategic vulnerability.

A hundred miles from the coast of China is the nationalist government in Taiwan – and the most talked about potential supply chain disruption. Taiwan is home to the most sophisticated chip factories or foundries in the world. The most important of these is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC, which has a fifty per cent share of the world’s microprocessors, and around half of the revenue banked by chip manufacturers. All of TSMC’s foundries are located either on the island of Taiwan, or in mainland Communist Party-controlled China itself. But arguably more significant than its volumes, is the fact that TSMC produces the most advanced chips in the world.

These are built to a 5 nanometer (nm) process, with a 3nm process coming later this

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year, in 2022. The dimension once referred to something specific - the width of the transistor gate, but confusingly, it is now a marketing term independent of any technical characteristic. Nevertheless, a lower process size still corresponds to an increase in transistor density, and more transistors means more logic, or more memory capacity (or both), on any given die size. This means more chips per wafer, and a lower ratio of faulty chips. TSMC creates 5nm chips for the US company AMD, for Apple and Qualcomm, and each is recognised as the leader in performance in its category.

“China has been trying to build up its semiconductor industry for fifty years and it’s found it’s hard to do,” says Dr Rosilyn Layton of the American Enterprise Institute, co-founder of the China Tech Threat think tank and chair of the Telecom Policy Research Conference. “It’s not like building a car. They have the demand internally, but even after poaching some of the best from companies like TSMC, or Applied Materials, they don’t have the designers of the chips.”

Chinese aggression towards Taiwan has increased sharply since the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. There’s no doubt that capturing TSMC would be a prize for the People’s Republic technology industry.

“Taiwan is quite compromised,” says Layton. “Will TSMC be able to operate as before if the board is commandeered or enjoined?”

GEOPOLITICS

TSMC is rushing to complete its first foundries in Europe and the United States, but attention is now focused on Chinese technology acquisitions.

The juddering restart to manufacturing post-pandemic has also prompted more direct attention from Governments. David Rogers notes that this was on the radar before coronavirus hit, as vital suppliers were on the entity list.

In 2018, UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy [BEIS) published the National Security and Investment White Paper, proposing safeguards for foreign takeovers. Currently only three UK companies are protected – BAE Systems, NATS and Rolls-Royce – via a ‘golden share’ owned by the UK Government.

This culminated in the National Security and Investment Act 2021, the NSI, which

came into effect on 4 January. for more information see www.bit.ly/3yboLPF. This new legislation gives the Government the power to “call in”, that is to say review, an acquisition “for assessment if it reasonably suspects that it is a qualifying acquisition (this guidance explains what these are) that has given rise to, or may give rise to, a risk to national security.” It has the powers to impose conditions or ultimately, block the transaction.

China recently acquired a small Welsh graphene manufacturer The Perpetuus Group with the Business Secretary referring the bid to the CMA. But it comes too late to stop the leading compound semiconductor facility, Newport Wafer Fab, being acquired by a Chinese-controlled entity. Compound semiconductors are highly advanced components that amplify power and light, and do the job by an order of magnitude better

than silicon chips. The UK has carved out a global lead in these vital components, which are critical to the performance of products ranging from electric vehicles to satellites.

Wingtech acquired Newport Wafer Fab despite the presence of US bidders.

“Those chips end up in lots of things. If that happens to be on an Electronic Control Unit that’s the core component of a car, then the car won’t move. You can’t easily substitute it. The global supply chain relies on these pivot points,” says Rogers.

Governments have no choice but to intervene. “There’s no resilience in the supply chains. The Americans, the Germans, we realise that. So subsidies are coming in” A shortage of the finished microprocessor is the most obvious manifestation of semiconductor fragility. But in recent years attention has been drawn to the companies and technologies that make the chip: the vital tools that make the tools.

Companies including Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research have all supplied manufacturing equipment to firms like CXMT and YMTC, both linked to the Chinese military.

Dr Layton has echoed calls for the US to enforce the 2018 Export Control and Reform Act to block such sales. It’s trickier when the manufacturer is not American. For example, only two companies, ASML based in the Netherlands, and Japans Nikon, produce extreme ultraviolet photolithography equipment which etch the silicon. And only ASML can produce it for 5nm processes. The US has tried to convince ASML not to export its state-of-the-art lithography equipment to China but received pushback.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

T

he protection of intellectual property is another focus. Doing business in China means creating a joint venture, in which technology transfer to the Middle Kingdom is implicit. A decade ago the China Business Review estimated that IP theft reduced the potential profits of European companies by 20 per cent.

Semiconductors are hard to copy. The CIA noted how China has taken an innovative approach to stealing commercial secrets. The “thousand grains of sand” method uses civilians or amateur information gatherers.

“I think if we quit America and went entirely back to China, China’s development would halt,” a senior

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Chinese engineer in Silicon Valley cited in Studies in Intelligence (Vol 59/4, 2015)...

“America is the base that will allow China to develop.”

Shockwaves reverberated through the industry when it was reported that ARM’s China operation had declared itself the owner of ARM’s intellectual property and would develop its own products based on that.

Around 25 billion ARM-based chips were shipped in 2020. These reports turned out to be incorrect, but the industry is sufficiently worried by the takeover of ARM by Nvidia to increase investment in an open chip architecture called RISC-V. Opposition to export controls comes from manufacturers themselves – particularly in the United States, and is voiced through the trade organisation SEMI, which represents the global electronics design and manufacturing supply chain. American chip companies earn more than 25 percent of their revenue from the Chinese market “Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment makers don’t care where demand is coming from,” Risto Puhakka, President of VLSI Research, has admitted. “As long as the ducks are quacking they are generally not concerned where the end market resides.”

Senator Tom Cotton calls it the ‘Long War’, of which 5G is a part. The United States should “restore secure, scalable domestic productive capacity in areas critical to national security” he writes in his policy document. And it should not be distracted.

“They will gladly promise to reduce carbon emissions in 2060 if the United States would merely give them Taiwan today,” Cotton writes in a policy document Layton agrees that this is difficult today.

The Wassenaar Agreement is an export control regime that covers conventional weapons and dual use technologies. It’s in the hands of the US Department of Commerce today, but Layton is one of several voices calling for it to be moved the State Department.

RARE EARTHS AND OTHER MINERALS

T

he building blocks of the electronics supply chain are raw minerals themselves, and this is the high-tech manufacturing industry’s Achilles heel. A small number of elements are vital to batteries, electronics circuits, magnets

for turbines, and without them phones, electric cars and communication and computing equipment can’t get made at all.

This makes them the core of an economic and national security policy. Not only has globalisation allowed China to maintain a monopoly over the supply of many of these, they will be even more important given the legislative commitments to ‘clean’ technologies.

The World Bank estimates production of mineral essential to clean tech, such as graphite, lithium and cobalt, will have to increase by almost 500 per cent by 2050.

Lithium production alone will need to increase from between thirteen and fifty-one times the level it is today, depending on which battery technology eventually prevails. If the UK were to switch every petrol or diesel powered vehicle for an electric equivalent, it would require twice the world’s annual cobalt production today – just for the UK. Much of it is mined by children.

The most strategic of these minerals are seventeen ‘rare earth’ elements, but in a future increasingly dependent on batteries, cobalt

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and lithium are equally vital.

Rare earths were viewed as a vital strategic asset by the United States from the 1950s onwards, and provided public support.

By the 1970s it was the established world leader in their supply. It funded a Rare-earth Information Center to disseminate knowledge throughout the private sector. China copied the policy in the 1980s, but the US lost interest. RIC was abolished. The waning production is because it’s a dirty business: processing one ton of rare earths is estimated to generate 2000 tonnes of toxic by-products.

Responding to pressure from environmentalists, domestic US production was downscaled, and much shifted to China.

Calls to maintain the extraction and refining of rare earth minerals as a strategic asset were ignored in the rush to globalisation. By 2001 China had become the leading exporter of rare earths, although it has shifted strategy again in recent years. Since extraction is labour intensive and difficult, China has reduced its domestic extraction and instead now dominates the separation and processing stages. Nevertheless, this

GEOPOLITICS

gives China control of 90 per cent of the refining and processing of the minerals.

For example, the group of neodymium, dysprosium and praseodymium known as NdpR are needed as magnets in electric motors and wind turbines. China refines 70 per cent of the neodymium used.

As a result of the 190,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets 175,000 are made in China. 80 per cent of lithium. Japan makes a chilling case study. In 2010 in response to a diplomatic dispute over the Senkaku Islands, China cut exports of rare earths by 40 per cent. The global market price quadrupled.

Japanese government then established a strategy of finding alternatives supplies, explicitly called “Escaping China”. This saw investments made in South Africa, the United States, Brazil, Chile, Kazakhstan, and Malaysia. It has not been easy; in a decade it has 59 per cent of the Chinese supply.

“The deployment of 5G networks, for example, will support a number of industries that will become voracious consumers of critical minerals,” the China Research Group noted in a November 2021 report.

“There are very few rare earth projects without any links to China, thus significantly complicating any attempt to reduce

dependence.” One additional problem is that China keeps prices low, deterring private investment in alternative suppliers. Increased competition for non-China minerals however has seen prices rise, with lithium increasing fivefold in the past year.

“Of thirteen potential sites in Africa, for example, only two are producing, three have failed, and the other eight are at very early stages. There are issues of contested ownership, nationalization, and of course environmental concerns. Most of these projects started at least a decade ago,” Kristin Vekasi of the University of Maine noted in 2019.

Controversially. Hunter Biden’s investment firm brokered a $3.8 bn deal that transferred a US owned Copper and Cobalt producer in the Democratic Republic of Congo to China Molybdenum.

Belatedly, Governments are recognising the policy as a strategic error, and are working on building domestic or regionalised supply chains. With its world class scientists, the UK has been doing some innovative policy work too.

Last April the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials and the Critical Elements and

Security compromises are defined to include:

SECURING THE NETWORKS The Telecommunications (Security) Act became law on 17th November 2021.

The act gives the government new powers to boost the security standards of the UK’s telecoms networks and remove the threat of high risk vendors.

The Act will require “all telecoms providers to take appropriate and proportionate measures to identify and reduce the risks of security compromises occurring, as well as preparing for the occurrence of security compromises”.

• Anything that compromises the availability, performance or functionality of a network or service.

• Any unauthorised access to, interference with or exploitation of networks or services.

• Anything that compromises the confidentiality of signals or data.

• Anything that causes signals or data to be lost, unintentionally altered or altered without permission of the telecoms provider.

• Anything occurring in connection with a network or service that causes a compromise on another network or service that belongs to another telecoms provider.

Everyone’s covered, from traditional MNOs to newer networks.

The code of practice will apply to the largest nationalscale (‘Tier 1’) telecoms providers, “whose availability and security is critical to people and businesses across the UK”, and these will be subject to intensive monitoring and oversight from Ofcom.

The code will also apply to medium-sized (‘Tier 2’) telecoms providers, who will be subject to some Ofcom oversight and monitoring.

These providers are expected to have more time to implement the security measures set out in the code of practice.

The smallest (‘Tier 3’) telecoms providers, including small businesses and micro enterprises, will also need to comply with the law.

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Materials (CrEAM) chaired by former chief scientific advisor to the Government, Sir John Beddington reported. The Centre recommend “Make the UK an international refining centre for specific technology-critical metals by 2025.” In addition, it recommended reviewing waste management laws so much more can be recycled. The recycling rate for lithium batteries, for example, is very low at 3 per cent. The EU has mandated a target of 70 per cent by 2030.

The China Research Group also recommends that the UK both encourage processing and take the lead in recycling.

“This strategy looks increasingly out of kilter with almost every major industrial economy, exposing us to a high level of risk of supply disruption. This is compounded by poor supply chain transparency,” the Group reports.

The Advanced Propulsion Centre as part of the Automotive Transformation Fund has also investigated the possible establishment of an independent, non-Chinese and UK-based Rare Earth magnet operation in the UK to produce neodymium iron boron magnets.

In May 2021, Less Common Metals Ltd published a study for the Advanced Propulsion Centre about providing a source of magnets for UK industry independent of China. In addition to NdPr, dyprosium and terbium are needed – and much rarer. It acknowledged that creating a market will be challenging, because of China’s pricing. – raw material prices are 20 per cent lower than published export prices. A robust non-Chinese supply chain requires: an integrated mine to magnet company, or agreement to take a single margin at point of sale.

CYBER THREATS

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n recent years cyber strikes by states, or groups affiliated with states, have begun to pose a genuine risk to national security – and telecommunications has been in the front line. With the industry’s increasing reliance on software, and the intrinsic interconnected nature of networks, that’s created what experts call a greater “attack surface”.

These factors were behind both the decision to control “high risk vendors” within the UK telecoms supply chain, confirmed in January 2020, along with the recognition that the mobile telecoms equipment supply chain lacked diversity –

another risk. his is being addressed by the Telecom Supply Chain Diversification strategy backed by £250m - which includes FRANC. Sovereign states now face catastrophic threats – something encapsulated in the acronym MAED (Mutually Assured Economic Assured Destruction) or MADE (Mutually Assured Destruction of Economy (MADE) – an echo of the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that dominated the Cold War. This is explained in a 2011 paper by the US think tank the Rand Corporation: “The operation of MAED is somewhat different from classic mutual assured destruction (MAD). It is at least theoretically possible to limit the escalation of a military clash to the sub-nuclear level. It is not possible to so limit the economic consequences. For example China is not going to continue buying US Treasury notes if the American and Chinese navies clash somewhere off Taiwan or in the South China Sea. Apple is not going to be shipping iPads from factoriesin China..” But the analogy may be misleading, because the reciprocity that made MAD work can’t be guaranteed after a first-cyberstrike.

“A first strike might be worse than a nuclear first strike. There will be no response. It may not be possible to strike back,” a national security expert tells us.

Ransomware attacks hit the headlines in 2017 when large parts of the NHS were

CORNISH LITHIUM Trelavour Downs produced economic lithium during the second world war. In early 2020, Cornish Lithium’s geologists conducted a highly successful experimental drilling programme. This demonstrated that Lithium grades were present at depth.

Cornish Lithium plans to accelerate work to prove the viability of the projec and to expand on its metallurgical testwork by building its first mineral processing pilot plant to treat 20 tonnes of granite and produce a lithium mica concentrate and furthering work on producing battery grade lithium hydroxide at a larger scale. crippled for weeks by the WannaCry virus.

Typically, the attack begins with a successful phishing attack with just one employee clicking a link, and activating a vulnerability in the local PC. This spreads to the network. The software then encrypts an organisation’s computers and demands for payment are made. Although little publicised, many do.

No ransom was ever paid with WannaCry, and Marcus Hutchins, a British hacker, found a kill switch within the virus. It’s believed the software was the North Korean Government conducting cyber weapons testing.

A more recent threat came with the Solar Winds attack, the most extensive supply chain

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attack seen so far. This did not require an employee to activate, but the complacency of a trusted vendor.

Malicious code was inserted a widely-used piece of enterprise management software, deployed by many government agencies and Fortune 500 companies - including the ten largest telecoms companies in the United States, It lay inactivate for many months. Brad Smith of Microsoft called it “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen”. Supply chain attacks like this are extremely difficult to defend against, as the customer trusts the software vendor to inspect the integrity of what it distributes. Solar Winds stealthy nature meant it was undetected.

The UK can claim a leadership position with the National Cyberspace Security Centre, and over a decade of operating the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), a partnership with GCHQ which inspected software code, binaries and development processes in great detail. The most recent report in 2020 concluded that Huawei’s promised security transformation scheme, announced was little more than talk, something independent experts confirm. It has been the work of the NCSC that has ultimately led to the recommendations that now manifest themselves in the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 which became law on the 17th November.

GEOPOLITICS

CIVIL DEFENCE

S

ome long-term macroeconomic trends become apparent only when you piece together the separate parts of the picture.

One is the workforce and skills. Concern has been raised recently that 75 per cent of US technology sector workers are not US citizens. While the most ambitious and talented can reach the top – the CEOs of Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, IBM, Adobe VMWare and now Twitter were born in India for three decades, Silicon Valley has become increasingly dependent on relatively low-cost labour.

In the UK telecoms sector there are signs industry is stepping up. Networks need skills and in October last year, Vodafone announced the creation of 7,000 new software engineering posts across Europe, almost doubling the software services team. The new teams will work on products and services

ranging from IoT, smart features of networks and cyber security.

As discussed above, dominance over the price and supply of key materials and tools makes sovereign states uncomfortably dependent on one source for key technologies. But this may only be the start.

“China has transformed itself into a cleanenergy powerhouse that now produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion batteries,” the MIT Technology Review noted in August 2020.

In a market economy, China kept its input costs low, driving out competition from Europe and the rest of Asia. The full report can be reaad at www.bit.ly/31KHh5h.

Powered by cheap energy, China stands to dominate far more supply chains, including finished products like electric vehicles. Mobile manufacturer Xiaomi committed $10 billion to creating a rival to low cost Chinese manufacturers. In the automotive sector Nio and Xpeng produce electric vehicles that are

the past,” Ericsson researchers warned in 2019.

SATELLITES AND GPS One very obvious risk to the telecoms infrastructure passes silently and invisibly over your head. The world’s mobile networks rely on the GPS satellite network, run by the US military, and used by billions around the world.

Reliability was already an issue of increasing concern.

An analysis by Ericsson of North American operators revealed that GPS loss of one hour or longer affected more than 15 per cent of all sites nationwide over a 12-month period. This impacted the applications we use every day.

“Timing outages are destined to become significant performance and availability challenges, even for providers that were never affected by such events in

But in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, newer and potentially catastrophic space-based threats have emerged.

Two dozen GPS satellites orbit at an altitude of about 12,550 miles, which is about half the altitude of a traditional geostationary (fixed position) satellite, but much higher than the new generation of LEO (low earth orbit) satellites like Starlink, and the UK-backed OneWeb. Physically targeting a GPS was technologically challenging – something relegated to a Bond villain – with attackers preferring to develop jamming and spoofing attacks. GPS jamming works by broadcasting noise on the same frequency as that used by the satellites. In turn this has prompted the relatively new field of anti-jamming techniques.

Blind Interference Signal Suppression (BLISS) is being developed to jam the jammers.

But in November last year.

Russia demonstrated an entirely new threat: an ASAT (anti-satellite) weapon that destroyed its own Kosmos 148 satellite. This created a debris ‘cloud’ of some 1,500 objects, posing a risk for other space users, including the International Space Station. As if to emphasise the threat, a Russian newsreader accompanied a report with the warning that GPS would be targeted.

Neither Russia nor China rely on GPS, as they have their own GLONASS and Beidou satellite networks, with similar numbers in orbit. The two powers have been co-operating ever more closely on these since January 2014. For example, the Chinese and Russian satellite networks now share a common monitoring and assessment platform, and both will be based on a common multi-frequency radio frequency chip going forward. Roscosmos will install a satellite groundmonitoring station in Shanghai and reciprocal Chinese stations will be built in Russia.

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far cheaper than Western manufacturers.

Observers see analogies between where the Chinese car manufacturers are today and the entrance of the Japanese companies in the 1960s. Chinese companies already own Volvo, Lotus and MG. The move to electrification and a greater level of technological innovation in cars and the whole mobility market plays well to the introduction of new market entrants who don’t have anything to lose.

Professor Jun Arima, Japan’s representative to fifteen UN COP climate conferences, and a lead author a Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.

“The pragmatism of the Paris Agreement has recently warned of the long-term consequences of an asymmetric approach to carbon dioxide reductions.

“Emissions reductions in the West mean cheap energy for China,” Arima explains. “On the other hand, the developed world is facing the high costs of rapid reductions in fossil fuel consumption and the purchase of renewable equipment, solar, wind turbines and electric vehicles from China. This simply helps make Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’ – the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation – a reality”.

Professor Arima notes that China has already committed tens of billions of dollars building coal-fired power plants in 152 countries through its Belt and Road Initiative, and is involved in more than 300 current projects, financing 70 per cent of the coalfired power plants under construction worldwide. That gives it a huge and permanent manufacturing advantage – with multiple supply chains now at risk. Arima is also concerned that unobtainable ‘net zero’ targets have derailed what was a global consensus on climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement (concluded at COP21 in 2015) allowed nations to self-report, but this gave way to what Arima calls the “inflexible fundamentalism” of demands for ‘Net Zero’, which has split the world’s developed and developing nations, as we saw at the conclusion of COP26.

“China is the sole beneficiary of these … policies and the international discord that they create,” Arima wrote recently. He was also an early critic of China’s proposed global power grid – although after covid there seems little prospect of Western democratic nations signing up to that.

Today’s telecoms supply chain diversification looks prescient - diversification is here to stay.

Trusted to expand 5G connectivity around the world At CGI, we recognise the transformational power of 5G and how it enables organisations to understand the many potential benefits that private networks can offer them.

Working with Nokia, we are showcasing how private networks can transform businesses. We are also working with the UK government and Space Agencies to demonstrate how satellites can augment terrestrial coverage. We are exploring the potential of 5G, increasing the accuracy of services, augmented reality, IoT and the application to robotics.

We are turning potential into reality.

Go to cgi.com/uk/communications/5g

O P E N P R I V AT E N E T W O R K S

The future promises much more choice for the user, as new networks

Go Fifth and multiply of different shapes and sizes proliferate.

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Photograph Alex Wong

37MILLION CHANNELS OPEN PRIVATE NETWORKS Remembering the future can be a useful thought experiment.

Back in the 1980s, there were only four networks. Not mobile networks, but television channels. The trend of ‘de-massifying’ the media was made popular by the forecaster Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave, which referred to a coming proliferation of media choice. “Instead of masses of people all receiving the same messages, smaller de-massified groups will receive and send large amounts of their own imagery to one another,” he predicted. “Consensus will shatter”. YouTube alone has 37 million channels.

We may see a similar explosion of choice for mobile users – and people are already building it. While we probably won’t see the demise of Vodafone, Virgin Mobile O2, EE and Three, they may need to shuffle up a bit to make space for the new entrants, just as the terrestrial broadcasters did. Indeed, we can look further back and see that new media technologies tend to be additive: photographs didn’t kill portrait painting, and cinema didn’t kill theatre. Incumbents can respond by diversifying, which in telecommunications means the addition of specialist services.

Examples of these might be specialist networks for broadcasters who need more uplink than downlink, or for migrant communities who want cheap international calling and money transfer. A financial services customer might want complete

tracking and transparency for its operations with anonymity for clients.

The UK5G Testbeds and trials project gives us a glimpse of this future. In Liverpool, the health and social care team have built a dedicated mobile network to serve the local community, which can reduce the need for daily visits. In Manchester, the Smart Junctions project is building a dedicated network to imbue traffic lights with intelligence. By tackling not-spots from Orkney to Rural Dorset, left-behind communities that have been ignored by the big four mobile operators are benefitting from new and enhanced connectivity. And as ever, there are use cases which we’ve not thought of yet.

Of course, there is a distinction between a

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network and a channel. We’ve had mobile virtual networks since the 2G days, but in 5G, with network slicing it’s a core part of the proposition. This feature allows end-users the capabilities of a separate virtual network.

Where we can anticipate the most fundamental change however the growth in small, challenger carriers. Companies, communities, and campuses building their own networks, so that they can manage their own coverage, security and flexibility.

A university is a good example. It might have a campus with a number of noncontiguous sites, maybe even international sites. Some with low traffic areas may not have the coverage the university wants but there is no incentive for the major networks to fill in the not-spots or partial not spots. The solution is for the university to install its own network. Students and staff using SIM cards issued by the university get priority coverage with full access to the university systems and servers. Visitors, using SIM cards from another mobile network operator roam on to the university network. They still get the coverage that would not have been there without the network but they don’t have the same access to the university systems.

There are several different approaches to providing this kind of open, private network.

We’ll call one operator led and the other independent. You might think of two types of burger restaurant. The operator led is like a McDonalds franchise, the independent is like

O P E N P R I V AT E N E T W O R K S

the local café. In the franchise model the restaurant may be owned by a private individual but all the presentation and supplies come from the franchise owner. In the café model, the individual is free to choose their own burger recipe, and buy ingredients from whoever they choose.

OPERATOR ENABLED In an operator-enabled model, the organisation or landlord engages a system integrator or neutral host provider, such as Cellnex UK, Freshwave, Shared Access, BAI or WIG, to install the infrastructure that will enable one or more mobile operators to connect their radios and core. This model finds entities, such as a university, stadium, office building, stadium, rail or hotel, pulling public mobile coverage to areas that they require.

Mobile operators can therefore install their

ENTERPRISE PRIVATE NETWORKS

Marco Chilese. Chris Arthur Collins, Nathan Dumlao, Jonas Leupe

Enterprises such as ports, airports, and manufacturing plants often implement private networks for a variety of reasons. These include addressing the connectivity in on site “not” spots, particularly indoors where one or more of the public mobile operators does not sufficiently cover the area.

In the case of a private mobile network, the enterprise engages private network providers, such as AWTG, Cellnex, WIG, Telent or the four mobile operators to build an on-site network designed for the specific requirements of the enterprise.

In this deployment, only SIMs enabled by the private network can be used on the site and the private network provider has total control of the quality of the network.

Often, these enterprises, such as ports and airports, have contractors, customers and suppliers that visit and need coverage in those not spot areas. A private network does not inhibit an enterprise from opening up their private network to a controlled group of chosen users that are not “native” to the network. One example of this could be enabling access to a private network to a regular inbound roamer such as a vehicle that consistently visits the site.

The regular inbound roamer could be provided with a SIM for the site or ideally, roaming onto the site or specific SIMS could be enabled. Both of these use cases would be to benefit the enterprise.

To ensure security, the inbound user could be managed on a distinct vpn that does not touch the enterprise’s internal network and a limit to throughput could be enabled.

The future here will be to easily identify critical roamers from non-critical roamers and to be able to manage the use and throughput of the critical roamers.

At an airport contractors often outnumber full time airport staff. By providing these regular visitors with access to the private network, albeit in a way that does not conflict with critical airport working, an airport could improve information about site working, increase security and improve service to its customers.

Another advantage to private networks is the ability to build infrastructure on that facilitates access by public mobile network coverage in addition to the private network that is provided.

This is particularly applicable in locations such as stadiums and performance venues where the public network is more than filled with public use leaving the on-site operational users with often unreliable coverage. Data traffic can be managed so that running the stadium for commerce and security can be priorotised over fans communication.

With a private network with public access enabled, the security staff is able to access guaranteed coverage where it is needed, when it is needed.

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coverage easily. The operator-enabled model is somewhat of a “build it and they will come” proposition, as its success relies on the mobile operators joining it. A mobile operator will be installing its own hardware, traditionally on-site, as well as providing backhaul connectivity, and connecting via data central data centre. Both of the models, McDonalds or indie, require the mobile operator to agree the design, while the former also requires the operator to make a capital investment.

There are many reasons why mobile operators don’t and can’t cover all “not spots”.

The deployment of a common multi-operator infrastructure in a site makes it easier to deploy, but the mobile operator still needs to see a benefit to investing its equipment in a site if it isn’t funded by enterprise or the landlord. Factors include everything from the number and variety of their customers utilising the site, to the fact that the site is a customer of the mobile operator.

A good example is the system being installed in the London Underground by BAI systems. This is a 4G network, but the principal is the same. When you travel on the Tube, if your mobile operator has put its hardware and connectivity on the deployed shared system, you have a full signal. TfL has already installed a system on nine stops on the Jubilee line between Canning Town and Westminster in a pilot project.

Similarly, Cellnex and Network Rail have announced a 25 year agreement to provide high performance mobile service along the London to Brighton Mainline. This will include special coverage solutions for the tunnels and cuttings, macro coverage for the wider route area and bespoke Distributed Antenna Systems, known as DAS, installations for the stations at Clapham Junction, London Bridge and London Victoria.

Other venues that benefit from the DAS capability include stadiums whose population can grow from zero to over 80,000 people in an afternoon. These mobile operator enabling deployments are very popular in the USA where well known stadiums such as Wrigley Field in Chicago and Kyle Field at Texas A&M have announced deployment of DAS. In the UK, Cellnex has deployed a multi-operator solution at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester City FC. Once the system is in, the neutral host provider will approach one or all of the mobile networks to encourage them to interconnect with the department

which supplies private networks. The operator then installs a radio network which connects to the operator’s core and then to the outside world. Users within the organisation get the special SIMs, which are a variation on that one operator’s service with that operator’s roaming agreements. This has the limitation that only visitors who have SIMs which work with that operator can roam onto the private network.

ISLANDS OF COVERAGE

You keep hearing about all this stuff in Africa and all the rest of it, there are lots of European places that actually have no mobile coverage

Often called a Challenger Carrier, an area, such as a town or district, can choose to deploy its own mobile network to provide coverage where there is no public mobile network. In this form an independent model, the mobile network has its own identity.

There is one set of radios and antennas connecting to the network’s own core. This then connects to other operators and the public phone network.

As with the operator model, this network operator issues its own SIM cards. Users with SIM cards issued by other mobile operators will hang onto that operator’s signal until it fades completely, at which point the handset will look for an alternative and then find the independent and lock onto it.

This is a lot like visiting another country, but is only used to fill in small islands of poor coverage, such as very rural areas of low population. The main use for the issued SIM cards is fixed wireless access, giving residents of the areas which often have both poor mobile and fibre coverage access to the internet through a 5G router.

A good example is Ch4lke Mobile, a 5G

FUTURE SCENARIO

Testbeds and Trials project in Wiltshire.

Visitors to The Queens Head in Bowerchalke will see the name “Ch4lke mobile” on their phone, where previously they were not able to get a signal. In the local shop and community hub the WiFi is connected through a 5G cell on the roof of the nearby pub.

Small mobile network supplier, wavemobile, also offers a similar proposition nationwide.

This is the mobile network operator associated with base station equipment manufacturer cellXica, and wavemobile’s main purpose is to deploying the cells cellXica makes to ensure they perform as customers expect - what the software business calls ‘eating your own dog food’, the practice of using one’s own products or services.

The open private model is supported by wavemobile.

Customers from other networks will see Wavemobile on the screen of their phone, but will be able to use it just as though they were connected to one of the cells built by the network they pay each month.

The business model between Telet Research, which provided the technology to Ch4lke Mobile, and Wavemobile is somewhat different. Telet seeks to charge the consumer’s mobile network for carrying traffic. Currently, wavemobile doesn’t charge for interconnect; the costs of the traffic are so small the company absorbs those, and instead charges the site which has been provided with the improved coverage. Ant Timson, CEO of wavemobile is however investigating the possibility of interconnect charging.

But the models are still up in the air.

When a student with a university SIM leaves campus, their phone roams onto another mobile network operator. In the UK, this will be Vodafone, Virgin Mobile O2, EE and Three, but as the number of open private networks grows this could be a confederation of small

networks, then as he or she jumps onto a train they use the Network Rail 5G network, travelling to Heathrow where there is a network for the airport, then onto a network within the plane and finally roamed to Telecom Italia when they reach the Italian capital.

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Timson sees a possibility of charging an addon fee. Consumers might pay EE, Three or whoever their monthly fee of £30, and also pay Wavemobile an additional £1 a month to use their phone in the area where Wavemobile has coverage and the host network does not.

A similar approach is taken by Bluewave, the Isle of Man based telco which is owned by aql. This straddles the no-man’s land between private networks, and the major operators of EE, Vodafone, Virgin Mobile O2 and Three. The Isle of Man is regulated as a full national carrier both by Ofcom and the GSMA. It has UK numbering and roaming agreements with the vast majority of the networks across the world. The CEO of aql, Adam Beaumont explains that this allows it to build and connect networks that are both private and connected. Bluewave started as a wireless internet service provider and has migrated into mobile. We may see more ventures adopting this approach.

One of the hurdles that the new generation Open Private Networks has to jump is support for emergency calls. All 999 calls in the UK are handled by BT, with both the call and location information being passed to the emergency call centres by the network. Mobile phones can always make emergency calls, even if they don’t have a SIM installed. It’s down to the network they are on to bear the cost and pass the information to BT in the correct manner.

“Satisfying Ofcom that we’re doing all that correctly is actually number one priority” says

O P E N P R I V AT E N E T W O R K S

between being a private network, as Ant Timson explains. “In a really remote part of Sweden we are building a network commissioned by an unserved community.”

Instead of the traditional architecture of all cell sites feeding back to a central system, Timson explains that wavemobile has taken a decentralized approach “We’re deploying a remote core which has also been virtualized.”

The network is run by and for the community with remote private cores with remote private radios. The community can run their own SIM cards on that core, but they can also backhaul to the wavemobile network.

Timson says that this makes the most efficient use of the connectivity “All their local SIP traffic and internet drops out with a remote private core, but all the call traffic stuff comes back through us. It’s a way we can

augment lots of networks running off of our aggregated clusters”.

The business case really requires scale however, with Timson looking to build out the networks “Just dropping a cell down is not a very sensible way of doing it. If I want to drop 10 cells into a cluster, in the Arctic Circle in Sweden to basically provide coverage for people when they’re out walking because if anyone gets injured, they’ve got no coverage at all I can.”

Alvin Toffler was eerily prescient in predicting the explosion of media choice, with thousands of TV channels, and millions more on the internet – but it took a very long time to happen, and another 25 years for YouTube to launch, in 2005. But we won’t have to wait so long to see the fruits of the proliferation of networking choice. It’s is almost here, and consumers are already sampling the new networks.

Catherine Gull

Brett Jordan, Frank Luca, Mario Gogh, Nathan Dumlao, Milan Malkomes

wavemobile’s Timson.

Another example - and maybe a sign of what is to come - is the recently announced private network for Basingstoke’s central business district announced recently by the Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council.

Basingstoke isn’t waiting for the big four MNOs to build out their 5G. It’s awarded Cellnex a contract to roll out private 5G for Basing View, a business district that is home to 100-plus companies in sectors including professional and financial services, digital technology, cybersecurity and life sciences.

This network is private, used only by authorised users in the area, facilitates technical trials. and will enable the area to define how and where they use 5G. Major opportunities seem to await the Challenger Carriers in straddling the space

UK5G Advisory Board

Catherine Gull, originally from Texas, developed business in Private Networks eight years ago working with the largest ports and airports in the UK. Working with DCMS projects and consortiums found Catherine defining what’s next for the industry through the use of 5G. Catherine currently works at Cellnex and is on the advisory board of UK5G.

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22-23 March 2022 Birmingham

The UK’s 5G Showcase Realising the transformative potential of 5G

Whether you are looking to grow your business’ productivity or bring significant benefits to the citizens in your region, this event is not to be missed.

Register at: www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/events/uks-5g-showcase/

VERTICAL MARKETS

Transport, health and social care

Increasing the awareness and understanding of how 5G is relevant to British industry has been a priority for UK5G. We’ve been looking at how manufacturing, transport and logistics can be revolutionised with better connectivity.

But few sectors have been subject to as much sweeping change, and strain, as health and social care.

National Cancer Institute / unsplash.com

I

N THE WAKE OF THE COVID-19

pandemic, services saved countless lives and kept the UK going. Beyond the challenges presented by the crisis, it also served as an incredible accelerator of digital transformation: providing virtual care amid social distancing regulations. Yet despite significant progress, new ways of working are needed.

The industry, which employs over 1.3m people and cares for tens of millions more, is under mounting pressure. 5G, and the digital technologies it enables, can support more people-centric care, the transition from a reactive to preventative model, and move the delivery of care from clinics to communities.

As Adrian Smith, the health and social care lead for West Midlands 5G says: “better care, closer to home”. Networks can help to enable a new, more efficient, dispersed and inclusive health and social care system, helping to narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged members of our society.

Increased bandwidth supports multiple technologies and services simultaneously, over the same network, while low latency enables telemedicine, collaboration and remote assistance in a way that’s previously not been possible. For the NHS, video streaming and the sharing of medical imagery in real-time enables long-distance consultations, training, guided assistance.

Projects within the 5G Testbed & Trials programme have been demonstrating just

what that low latency can enable. Working with the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, the West Midlands 5G programme conducted the UK’s first demonstration of a remote-controlled ultrasound scan over a public 5G network. In addition to speeding up diagnosis, technology could reduce the number of unnecessary ambulance journeys and hospital visits, ensuring people don’t have to go through hospital stays.

What’s more, connectivity enables a layer of insight not previously possible. Data provides insight into emerging trends and 5G

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supports a greater density of connected devices and sensors that can be used to monitor welfare and health in the community for both those with long term conditions, such as diabetes, and those recently discharged from hospital. Essential telecare services can be expanded to support medication adherence, predictive monitoring and even digital tools to tackle social isolation and loneliness. The Liverpool 5G Health & Social Care project successfully trialled a digital loneliness device called ‘Push-to-Talk’ to over 40 individuals of different ages and personal circumstances, who struggled to get out of their homes and socialise. The device, connected enables communication with a range of users in different communities. The trial showed a marked reduction in loneliness amongst users, with a 50 per cent increase in those who said they “rarely felt isolated” and an impressive 30 per cent reduction in the number of people who visited their GP. The project also calculated that the potential cost saving of deploying the Push to Talk service was £868 per year per 100 users, showing the benefit to the sector as well as service users.

Perhaps most significantly, this is an example of how 5G can complement physical services.

Through network slicing and private networks, 5G allows care providers to ringfence specific services. 5G also allows for specific spectrum channels to be configured with increased security protocols.

Ann Williams—the Commissioning and Contracts manager of Adult Social services at Liverpool City Council—

TRANSPORT AND LOGISTICS Another sector that faced unprecedented challenges in the face of Covid, is the transport and logistics industry. Ubiquitous and reliable connectivity can enable developments such as barrier-free travel, real-time monitoring, improved passenger processing, baggage handling and crowd management. Navigation around high-density places, such as train and bus stations, can be especially difficult for vulnerable passengers or those requiring extra assistance: WM5G’s TRAVEL XR project seeks to improve the current operating systems using 5G’s higher capacity for camera data and locational accuracies. Drawing on data from wearables, cameras and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, the network is able to detect people in walkways and enable systems to offer guidance within stations, ultimately improving passenger safety and experience.

WM5G has deployed a number of solutions to monitor and optimise traffic throughout the West Midlands, home to some of the UK’s busiest and most congested roads. Firstly,

vehicle counting sensors with 5G connectivity were installed on two roads in Solihull with a high variety and density of traffic, for live traffic monitoring. Thanks to 5G and its much faster upload and download speeds, one network can sustain higher-quality processing or process a greater number of feeds—creating more comprehensive datasets than those currently possible with 4G. The data gathered enables the development of state-of-the-art prediction models that can be used to more accurately forecast traffic flow and help to manage congestion: more than any other sector, the transport and logistics industries have a duty to reduce their environmental impact.

Chris Holmes, Transport Programme Director at WM5G, said: “This has shown the value 5G sensors offer to road management. At the moment sources of traffic data are often limited in value and focussed on specific tasks such as speed control or general congestion information. The type of sensors shown in this trial sets a new benchmark. Intelligent sensors like these enable multiple uses including live incident management through to traffic control and even capturing detailed information about lane usage which will inform road designs of the future.”

5G can also help with predictive maintenance to ensure vehicles are kept in premium conditions, reducing particulate emissions. Remotely controlled drones for lastmile deliveries could further reduce road miles and subsequent carbon dioxide emissions.

While smart junctions, such as those being trialled in the Smart Junctions 5G project, can prioritise certain road users to support more sustainable travel options such as cycling or buses.

Drones can also be used to improve security in controlled spaces such as airports and ports. The West of England Combined

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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.

Ian Taylor / unsplash.com

provides an insight into the benefits of private 5G networks: “Implementing cellular carriers and our own 5G network has, genuinely, been a gamechanger: health inequalities have been reduced and the digital divide (a major concern for my sector, especially amid the pandemic) is now shrinking.” She added: “I work in a very dense deprived urban area, where the connectivity cost is prohibitive despite there being good connectivity available. The families we work with have to make a choice between heat or eat, and telecoms is not on the priority list. Providing our own network makes technology accessible. We now have a much better agreement and take charge of the cost.

Connectivity should not be a privilege; in the modern world, it is a basic right.”

Authority’s 5G Logistics project is testing automated drone flights for port police at Bristol Port, to demonstrate how efficiency could be improved by event-triggered surveillance and multi-robot integration. Earlier this year, Project XCelerate conducted flight trials along an 8km-long corridor, and it hopes to demonstrate how drones can operate safely in the same airspace as manned aviation. The key use cases will include the use of drones to assist the emergency services, for 3D mapping, to aid the police force, and to undergo safety inspections.

Knowing what 5G can do is, however, only one part of the puzzle. We have, therefore, launched two more vertical hubs on our website, dedicated to those working in the health and social care and the transport and logistics industries (just go to Discover and 5G by sector from the homepage). They explain the benefits of 5G, focusing on use cases in clear focus areas. For health and social care, we cover self-care, wellness and prevention; diagnosis and screening; medical treatment; independent living and community support; infrastructure and operations; and logistics.

While transport and logistics explore the movement of people (transport, both public and private); movement of goods (logistics, including freight and warehousing); infrastructure (the assets that underpin the sector, including roads and rolling stock); and operations (the services layered across the sector, affecting user experience and cost). Our supplier directory also helps organisations find the right companies to ensure they achieve their ambitions, while a dedicated event series has provided the opportunity to hear directly from those who have been there, done that, and learned the lessons that others can benefit from.

UK5G is here to help sectors find the right resources and connections to map a clear path to 5G.

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The art of joining up An ecosystem is much more than the sum of its parts. It’s working together which has made the projects so valuable to the country VER FOUR YEARS

the 32 DCMS supported 5G Testbeds and Trials projects have successfully demonstrated genuine progress in numerous 5G use cases.

It started with funding three universities to investigate 5G and, over several rounds, scaled to 20 projects in the 5G Create cohort.

The projects - formed of consortia of various sizes - are great examples of joining up people and organisations.

This is not just about the technology, of course, it is as much about the business models and the forging of new relationships between people. It is in an atmosphere of trust between individuals that real innovation and progress is made.

I’d like to think that the UK5G network of networks has also joined together the projects with the wider supply and demand ecosystem and developed a sense of momentum. A good foundation has been established for innovation in telecoms.

And UK5G has been supporting DCMS in developing the next phase of innovation projects through the design and promotion of FRANC, described in this edition of the Innovation Briefing. It’s pleasing to note is how much of a connection there is between the Testbeds and Trials projects and the new telecom supply chain diversification projects.

Our survey of 30 Testbeds and Trials projects showed just how many were already exploring Open RAN (19 stated they were looking at Open RAN or Multi-operator RAN and 6 had Open RAN as a highest priority).

The organisations involved in FRANC have many familiar names and a number of projects built on the trusted relationships that have been developed during the 5GTT programme.

Through 2022 will see most of the original Testbeds and Trials projects coming to an end, projects are due to complete at the end of March, although opportunities for extensions are being evaluated.

Whenever the projects officially finish the joining up does not stop there. We want to help the projects show off their emerging benefits and opportunities, so that the organisations and business involved can grow and prosper. This is why UK5G, along with DCMS colleagues, is planning The UK’s 5G Trials International Showcase event in Birmingham on the 22nd and 23rd of March.

We want to identify how 5G technologies and use cases are approaching readiness for market. What hard-won lessons have been learnt through testing and trialling these new technologies? What are the next steps in the commercial journey? How can we share experience in market scalable applications of 5G and work with international partners and investors to stimulate 5G adoption together globally?

The conference and exhibition will be targeted at senior stakeholders across the investment community, government, industry and the public sector, drawn from across the UK and the globe. We will also want to explore the opportunities arising from the new telecom supply chain diversification programme.

Pulling together an event like this is a task of some magnitude for our team and we can only hope that the Omicron variant has abated by the end of March so that we can safely gather together.

Ironically the communications industry which has been seen to be instumental in helping us ride out the pandemic, allowing us to Zoom, Meet and Teams, has been held back by the inability to have face to face events. Before the pandemic I was going to at least one 5G event a week. We have grown 5G without many of the face to face events but it still feels as though there is more missing than convivial coffee and sausage rolls!

And thinking about a post-pandemic UK we all realise that we don’t just need to recover, but we must transform. Britain needs to emerge from the economic and societal shock which has been caused by COVID-19, fit to compete in a transformed

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digital economy.

Many companies are working hard to wire and wireless up the UK with a number of different schemes.

But we also need to look to how the enhanced communications will be used.

Digital and green technologies will change the way we live and work in the coming decade.

Access to health and social care, education, mobility, media & entertainment, manufacturing, retail, energy and even how we monitor and manage our environment, cities and countryside - all will be changed by digital technology. And the readiness for change is demonstrably high, shown by the rapid acceleration of the use of digital technologies during the crisis.

UK Government ministers have repeatedly committed to 5G digital leadership over the years. Indeed an estimated £1-2bn is invested by central Government in digital innovation programmes across a wide range of Government Departments and agencies.

The challenge of joining up across such programmes is very real, ensuring that the sum becomes more than the parts with programmes learn from one another.

So joining up will be absolutely critical in the positioning of the UK as a key player in the global digital future.

Robert Driver Head of UK5G

We create diverse connections to drive positive change.

Innovate UK KTN exists to connect innovators with new partners and new opportunities beyond their existing thinking – accelerating ambitious ideas into real-world solutions. Innovate UK KTN is part of the Innovate UK Group – the UK’s innovation agency.

Connect with us to access horizon-expanding events, potential partners, bespoke support and innovation insights.

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DISCOVER SOME OF THE WAYS YOU CAN HARNESS THE 5G OPPORTUNITY AND BE BETTER CONNECTED UK5G has created new online hubs to help organisations in the creative industries, manufacturing, transport & logistics, and health & social care to better understand how to use 5G and the benefits it can bring.

UK5G.ORG/DISCOVER/5G-INDUSTRY