Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced that the company has been selected as the only test, measurement and network visibility company to play a key role in a new European (EU) project – 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI) – to accelerate the acceptance of 5G across Europe. The new project is comprised of 23 partners including major telecom operators, industry vendors and academia.
5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI) is a pan-European research and innovation project financed by the EU’s Horizon 2020 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 explores solutions for vertical industries such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment and automotive.
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Keysight will contribute its proven expertise and capabilities in network test and measurement to the project, which are essential in deploying 5G networks and services. The company’s solutions will be used in trials to deploy prototype technologies. The project will also benefit from Keysight’s contributions in the form of test case development that will run on the test networks.
“We are looking forward to contributing our 5G expertise and technology to another 5G project in support of 5G deployment across Europe”, said Daniel Thomasson, vice president of Keysight Laboratories, the central applied research laboratory of Keysight Technologies. “5G-VINNI’s selection of Keysight as a project member is testament to our long-standing close collaborations with 5G market leaders.”
The €20 million project will be coordinated by Telenor Group, the international telecom operator headquartered in Norway. The project, scheduled to run for three years, will leverage the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5G PPP phases, and 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.
“We are excited to join 5G-VINNI and contribute with Keysight’s scalable, software-based end-to-end 5G design test capabilities,” said Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager for Keysight’s Wireless Devices and Operators group. “Our ultimate goal is that the entire mobile ecosystem will realize the full potential of 5G technology across a wide range of applications and devices.”
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 to ensure easy access to the 5G-VINNI facility.
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).