5G isn’t just about faster data speeds for consumers, it’s also set to transform a variety of industries, and the UK government seems set on making sure manufacturing is one of them, as it has just launched a £9 million project to that end.
The project, dubbed 5G-ENCODE, is the UK government’s biggest investment into 5G for manufacturing so far, and it will involve the creation of a private 5G network at the National Composites Centre (NCC).
That network will then be used to explore new business cases and value propositions for 5G in the manufacturing industry. New 5G technologies such as network slicing will be tested as part of this, as will the use of augmented reality and virtual reality applications in design and training, along with wireless real-time monitoring and analytics, and the monitoring and tracking of time-sensitive assets.
Led by Zeetta
The 5G-ENCODE project is led by Zeetta Networks, a company that was chosen because of its world-class expertise in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), its home-grown deployable private network solution, and its Multi-Domain Orchestrator (MDO).
Zeetta Networks also has experience with network slicing and splicing, and has successfully been involved in the government’s 5G RuralFirst project. So it’s an obvious fit.
Its technologies and expertise will be used to dynamically manage the private 5G network and allow numerous different industrial applications and services to be delivered over the same network infrastructure.
Zeetta Networks won’t be working alone though. The project also involves the NCC, Telefonica, Siemens, Toshiba, Solvay, Baker Hughes, Plataine, Mativision, the University of Bristol and the West of England Combined Authority (WECA).
The project has already been launched and together these organisations aim to deliver a real-life impact from it as soon as September 2020, with the 5G-ENCODE project set to end in March 2022. And this is just one of many 5G projects the government is funding across numerous regions and industries in the UK.
