(Fornebu, Norway, 4 July 2018) The EU has given Telenor Group coordination responsibility for its new European project to accelerate the uptake of 5G across Europe. The initiative, 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI), comprises 23 partners including major operators, academia and industry vendors.
The project is designed to ease uptake of 5G in Europe by providing an end-to-end facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies, and explore solutions for vertical industries such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment and automotive.
"We are proud to be given the opportunity to coordinate the 5G-VINNI project and to explore valuable future solutions for the vertical industries. Being one of three large-scale test platforms for Europe, 5G-VINNI will help propel the development of 5G. Our aim is to make it as easy as possible to utilise and test the platform and we now call on industry players in Europe to engage with the project," says Patrick Waldemar, Vice President of Telenor Research, who will manage the project for Telenor Group.
Four main sites across Europe The project will leverage the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5G PPP phases. This approach employs advanced network virtualization, slicing, radio and core technologies. In addition a rigorous automated testing campaign will be employed to validate 5G under various combinations of technologies and network loads.
5G-VINNI will be run at four main sites located in Norway, UK, Spain and Greece. In addition, experimental sites will be established in Germany and Portugal. Open APIs will be provided in order to ensure easy access to the 5G-VINNI facility.
The 5G facility in Norway will be run by Telenor Research, Telenor Norway and Telenor Satellite and hosted in two locations: one in Kongsberg, the first city where Telenor will pilot 5G in Norway , and another site in the greater Oslo area. Nokia will provide the virtualization platform and end-to-end orchestration, Ericsson and Huawei will supply 5G radios and core, and Cisco will deliver a distributed IoT data fabric service.
The project is scheduled to run for three years and has a budget of EUR 20 million.
Press contact: Peer Dahl Telenor Group Communications + 47 415 55 242 peer.dahl@telenor.com
About 5G-VINNI: 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI) is a pan-European research and innovation project financed by the EU's Horizon2020 programme. 5G-VINNI facilitates uptake of 5G in Europe by providing an end-to-end facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies, and explore solutions for vertical industries such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment and automotive. The project, which is coordinated by Telenor Group, is scheduled to run for three years at sites in Norway, UK, Spain, Greece, Germany and Portugal, and has a budget of 20 million euros.
The 5G-VINNI objectives are:
- Design an advanced and accessible 5G end-to-end facility.
- Build several interworking sites of the 5G-VINNI end-to-end facility.
- Provide user friendly zero-touch orchestration, operations and management systems for the 5G-VINNI facility.
- Validate the 5G KPIs and support the execution of E2E trial of vertical use cases to prove the 5G-VINNI capabilities.
- Develop a viable business and ecosystem model to support the life of the 5G-VINNI facility during and beyond the span of the project.
- Demonstrate the value of 5G solutions to the 5G community particularly to relevant standards and open source communities with a view to securing widespread adoption of these solutions.
Members of 5G-VINNI are: Telenor Group (Telenor Research, Telenor Norway and Telenor Satellite), British Telecom (UK), Telefonica (Spain), SES (Lux), Huawei (Norway and Germany), Ericsson (Norway), Nokia (Norway), Samsung (UK), Intracom (Greece), Keysight (Denmark), Cisco (Norway), Alticelabs (Portugal), Engineering (Italy), AUEB (Greece), UC2M (Spain), Simula (Norway), Uni.Patras (Greece), Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany), EANTC (Germany), Limemicro (UK), SRS (IR), and Eurescom (Germany).
