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.
The project will be supported by Nokia which will provide the virtualization platform and end-to-end orchestration, Ericsson and Huawei which will supply 5G radios and core, and Cisco which will deliver a distributed IoT data fabric service.
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.