Nokia and Intel are establishing new testing facilities in the US and Finland to develop 5G solutions, as Intel also announced the establishment of a 5G industry group in the US with Ericsson.
The labs will focus on developing 5G solutions in alignment with 3GPP standards in a live environment for the network, cloud and client.
This will include partnering with communications providers to help them find deployment options and identify models to make 5G a commercial reality.
Located in New Jersey in the US and Espoo in Finland, the labs will start out by testing LTE, 4.5G, 4.5G Pro and 4.9G technologies.
Nokia will provide its radio access, mobile transport and cloud platforms, while Intel will provide its 5G Mobile Trial Platform and expertise in areas such as mmWave and NB-IoT.
Intel has also co-founded a new initiative in the US with Ericsson that will partner with industrial stakeholders to drive 5G adoption in the country.
Initially, the 5G Innovators Initiative (5GI2) has signed up Honeywell, GE and the University of California – Berkeley to explore the links between 5G and the industrial IoT.
It will develop pilots for technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, including solutions for drone surveillance of hazardous environments. These will include step-by-step blueprints of the network, cloud and 5G connectivity requirements, including speed, security and analytics.
The initiative will move onto other areas such as autonomous driving, smart cities, healthcare and media as other partners join.
Ulf Ewaldsson, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer of Ericsson, said: “This collaboration brings together necessary competence from technology providers, industry partners and academia to find sustainable solutions to digitise and transform other industries.”
5GI2 co-founder Ericsson won a new deal this week to provide several technologies to support the virtualised global Managed Network Services offered by Verizon Enterprise Solutions to its customers. Thw Sweden-based vendor will provide end-to-end dynamic orchestration, closed-loop service assurance and virtual network function (VNF) onboarding and testing.