Technical Writer at 5G.co.uk
Sarah Wray is a technical writer with over 10 years' experience writing about technology, including telecoms, smart cities, data, IoT, aerospace, and more.
The European H2020 project, Flame, has launched its 5G testbed for large-scale trials of futuristic media services, such as augmented reality city tours.
The initial cities are Bristol and Barcelona, with plans to expand to other European cities over the next three years. The testbeds will demonstrate how 5G technologies can provide faster access to media and other new services such as augmented reality, and deliver them on-demand. Hundreds of people are expected to take part in the trials over the next year.
Testing, testing
The initial trials are set to start next month and will focus on areas such as enhancing audience-generated content for broadcasters, augmented reality gaming, personalised augmented reality tours of the city, and personalised mobile media access.
The FLAME project is made up of 12 partners including University of Southampton, InterDigital Europe, Atos Spain, i2CAT, University of Bristol, Nextworks, Martel Innovate, VRT, The Walt Disney Company, ETH Zurich, Institut Municipal d’Informatica de Barcelona, and Bristol is Open.
New media services on demand
The FLAME project aims to allow players in the smart city ecosystem to run 5G trials at city-scale to make it simpler to develop and deliver new media services, make it cheaper and easier to provide personalised on-demand content, and improve the experience for citizens.
The trials will use the FLAME Service Delivery platform, with a Next Generation Network Flexible IP-based Services (FLIPS) platform at its core. The platform was developed by InterDigital, one of the project partners.
The service delivery platform uses software-defined technology. Its advanced networking and service management capabilities mean that media services can be dynamically placed and connected on demand, as and where consumers require them.
Bristol wants to lead in 5G
This is another example of Bristol showing that it wants to be a leading UK city in 5G. Next month the city is set to hold the first live 5G public trial in the UK.
The trial will be open to the public and run with the University of Bristol, BT and Nokia on March 17 and 18 at We The Curious science centre. Other non-public parts of the trial will continue after those two days, and will explore areas such as Massive MIMO radio access solutions, software-defined networking, network slicing and edge computing nodes functionalities.
Useful read: What are 5G Testbeds
Image credit : Flame
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