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inCITES Consulting showcases and further develops its 5G expertise by participating in the recently-launched European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 project 5GCity
According to 5GCity, delivering on the 5G promise of increased data rates, and ubiquitous coverages, poses stringent requirements on traditional vertically integrated operators. In particular, telecom operators are expected to massively roll out Small Cells, which requires finding appropriate urban spaces with both backhaul and energy availability. Network sharing becomes essential to unlock those commercial massive deployments. The open access model, or neutral host, will come to play a key role on the deployment of 5G networks, especially in urban scenarios where very dense Small Cell deployments are required. In parallel recent trends are paving the way towards the development of new, heterogeneous and distributed cloud paradigms that significantly differ from today’s established cloud model: with edge computing, cloud architectures are pushed all the way to the edge of the network, close to the devices that produce and act on data. We posit that there are two sets of players perfectly poised to take advantage of both trends since they already own the infrastructure needed to build edge deployments: telecommunication providers and municipalities. 5GCity focuses on how common smart city infrastructure (i.e.,small cells and processing power at the very edge of networks) can bring benefit to both players based on resource sharing and end-to-end virtualization, pushing the cloud model to the extreme edge. 5GCity will design, develop, deploy and demonstrate a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts. 5GCity’s main aim is to build and deploy a common, multi-tenant, open platform that extends the (centralized) cloud model to the extreme edge of the network, with a demonstration in three different cities (Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca). 5GCity will directly impact a large and varied range of actors: (i) telecom providers; (ii) municipalities; and (iii) a number of different vertical sectors utilizing the city infrastructure.
“We are excited to participate in the 5GCity project and be one of the key contributors to the pan-European thought leadership around 5G. This is a great opportunity for us to continue developing our 5G business modelling expertise alongside other major institutions on cutting-edge technology projects”, says Dr. Ioannis Neokosmidis, CEO at inCITES Consulting.
5GCity is set to last for a 30-month period and it will be coordinated by Fundació i2CAT, Internet i Innovació Digital a Catalunya and funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020 program) under the grant agreement No: 761508.
The 5GCity consortium involves 18 partners from 7 different countries, namely Fundacio Privada i2CAT (ES – coordinator), NEC Europe LTD (UK – technical manager), Virtual Open Systems SARL (FR), Prismtech (FR), RETEVISION I S.A. (ES), University of Bristol (UK), Nextworks (IT), Comune Di Lucca (IT), Italtel SPA (IT), Institut Municipal D’ Informatics De Barcelona (ES), MOG Technologies S.A. (PT), H3G SPA (IT), RAI-RADIOTELEVISIONE ITALIANA SPA (IT), Ubiwhere LDA (PT), Informació i Comunicació de Barcelona S.A. (ES), INCITES Consulting SARL (LU), Accelleran (BE), Comunicare Digitale Aps (IT).
The kick-off meeting of the 5GCity project was held in Barcelona on June 20-21 where all project partners bounced off ideas related to the project and agreed on the schedule and objectives of the forthcoming tasks.
inCITES Consulting acts as a trusted research partner in 5GCity towards the identification of an innovative business model and the financial assessment of a potential investment of the proposed solution. inCITES Consulting aims to support 5GCity to extract useful guidelines for policy makers and regulators as well as to enable the market exploitation of the 5GCity solution.
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