Over the last few months, Airspan engineers have been taking part in the 5G-ENCODE Project, a £9 million collaborative effort to modernise UK manufacturing by using 5G technology. Giuseppe Bernini, VP of Sales in Europe, and Gabriel Perez, 5G Open RAN Technical Director, tell us about how the project broke new ground.

5G private networks have the potential to revolutionise the manufacturing industry. They can increase efficiency and enable a new range of applications, from virtual reality to big data analytics, to help make the UK a leader in developing industrial use cases. With this project, our aim was to take the initial steps to show how this could be achieved.

As part of a consortium that was led by Zeetta Networks and included industry players like Siemens and Toshiba, we worked to deploy a state-of-the-art private 5G testbed at the National Composites Centre, an industry research facility based in Bristol.

The results were a major step in demonstrating what is possible. Despite encountering performance and stability challenges, we successfully deployed a private 5G Open RAN network, one of the first of its kind in the UK, which was particularly remarkable given the number of partners working on it. Achieving this has given Airspan and the wider industry confidence that we can accelerate our work with the technology.

The project also helped us identify improvement areas such as uplink capacity, the upload of data from a device to the 5G network. Airspan’s R&D teams are now working on support of new frame structures, in which more time is allocated to the user equipment for uplink transmission, at our Innovation Lab in Slough.

This type of project is important, not just for Airspan, but for the wider industry in order to improve 5G networks and make private 5G an accessible and transformative solution for businesses across the country. As one of the first Open RAN ecosystems of its kind in the UK, it has taken a lot of effort to bring all of the moving parts together, but it was brilliant to see our idea develop from a written plan into a fully functional network that can act as a model for future projects. This isn’t PowerPoint any more, it’s real.