Nokia has announced a five-year deal with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to build and run a 5G innovation facility at the university’s Tech Lab campus in Sydney, Australia. The new lab will see Nokia and UTS test 5G use cases with partners for “Industry 4.0, IoT, and smart cities”.
The setup covers a 5G lab and 5G use case demo area, said Nokia. It will build “campus-wide 5G coverage” to allow for development and testing of industrial IoT use cases in both lab and field. It will also serve as an environment for new research opportunities within the ICT sector, they said. Nokia is putting a “multi-million-dollar investment” into the effort, based on a view that 5G (and future 6G) infrastructure will underpin critical industry and economic growth.
The new lab will also connect directly into the university’s anechoic radio frequency test chamber, the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere, allowing researchers to test the potential of antenna technologies like massive MIMO. Nokia called it an “exciting 5G adventure”. UTS said it will “unlock” the 5G and 6G as a springboard infrastructure for wider digital-change.
A statement said: “Researchers and commercial partners will undertake projects to explore the capabilities of 5G and 6G for Industry 4.0 applications such as industrial automation, agriculture, and human-robot interactions, as well as IoT capabilities for internet-of-energy applications in smart grid, energy storage and management, and wireless power transfer.”
The site already has its own Industry 4.0 lab, billed a “first-of-its-kind industrial microalgae production facility” for partners to experiment with “advanced manufacturing, medical and pharmaceutical tech, energy resources, and mining management”. UTS said the 5G/6G and IoT lab covers vehicular and drone comms and machine-type comms in IoT, with a focus on “modelling and analysing the impact on massive numbers of devices, ultra-reliable communications, low latency communications, and cyber security”.
Ray Kirby, associate professor and director at UTS Tech Lab, said: “UTS Tech Lab is a unique facility that supports collaboration with industry on research and development projects. This partnership with Nokia will drive innovation and growth in 5G and 6G network infrastructure. [The combination will] facilitate the development of new applications to unlock the huge potential of 5G and 6G.”
Robert Joyce, regional chief technology officer at Nokia, said: “We are pleased to collaborate with UTS on this exciting 5G adventure. This partnership builds upon the existing innovative facilities at the university’s Tech Lab and will enable researchers to develop, test and demonstrate innovative uses of 5G here in Australia. We are already exploring some exciting 5G use cases unique to Australia and look forward to demonstrating these soon.”
