Norway-based Telenor Group has been given coordination responsibility by the EU for a project designed to accelerate the uptake of 5G across Europe. The initiative, known as ‘5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure’ (‘5G-VINNI’), comprises 23 partners including major operators, academia and industry vendors. It aims to facilitate uptake of 5G across the continent by providing an end-to-end facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies, while it will also explore solutions for vertical industries such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment and automotive.
5G-VINNI will leverage the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5GPPP phases, and will employ advanced network virtualisation, slicing, radio and core technologies. In addition, a rigorous automated testing campaign will be used 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, while experimental sites will be established in Germany and Portugal. The 5G facility in Norway will be run by Telenor Research, Telenor Norge 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 reportedly provide the virtualisation 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 EUR20 million (USD23 million).