UK looks to £250m to secure 5G and 6G telecoms supply chain
The UK government has announced a £250 million Open Networks R&D Fund to accelerate the development and deployment of open interface architectures such as Open RAN.
The funding from the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which oversees communications, is aiming to support existing programmes such as SONIC and FRANC projects but adding in a new UK Telecoms Lab (UKTL) and telecoms innovation network (UKTIN).
As part of this fund, universities and telecoms firms can apply for a share of up to £25 million to research and develop the next generation of 5G and 6G network equipment using Open RAN in 5G and 6G networks as part of the Future Open Networks Research Challenge.
The UKTL lab is deliberately aimed at UK security and supply chain diversification. This will enable both security evaluations of equipment and functional and secure interoperability testing, reducing barriers to the deployment of open-interface solutions. Businesses and researchers will be encouraged to use the UKTL to evaluate the security of telecoms equipment before deployment, and to take advantage of their guidance on mitigation measures where security falls short.
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However this is different from the £16m SmartRAN Open Networks Interoperability Centre (SONIC Labs) that is designed to help commercialise open-interface solutions and test their performance. This is a commercially-neutral, collaborative environment for open, disaggregated and software-centric network solutions and multi-vendor architectures maintained and operated by Digital Catapult and Ofcom to provide testing services for suppliers and empowers the wider community to demonstrate their equipment to the standards demanded by the network operators.
The UK government is also working with NEC, one of the leading suppliers of Open RAN equipment, to implement and demonstrate the performance of a ‘neutral host’ Open RAN solution in outdoor rural environments. This NeutrORAN project builds on NEC’s recent strategic investments to establish both a Global Open RAN Centre of Excellence and 5G Radio R&D Centre in the UK.
The project has established a testbed for a multi-operator, neutral host solution in Wales including in Cefn Du and Menai Science Park (M-Sparc) . This ‘neutral host’ solution is showcasing a more cost efficient way to deliver capacity and coverage to underserved regions with the potential for the architecture and deployment model to be scalable beyond the UK.
The UK will further invest up to £21 million to enable industry to integrate open-interface solutions from different suppliers to work together beyond the laboratory environment, both technically and commercially, to be deployed within public networks. This will give early indication on the viability of deploying and maintaining the operations of open interface architectures against the security and performance requirements for public telecoms providers’ networks and services.
Alongside NeutrORAN and other industry-led commercial trials and deployments for Open RAN, there will be up to £22m to collaboratively trial open-interface solutions in high demand density environments across the UK.
These real-world trials will look to utilise the test cases derived from the initial requirements of operators to provide an assessment of market readiness of the open-interface solutions and help analyse the capacity of the systems integration ecosystem in the UK. These technological developments and trials represent an opportunity for the UK to grow presence and influence within the global supply chain itself.
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Alongside this, the £10m UKTIN is a new UK telecoms innovation network led by the University of Bristol, Cambridge Wireless, Digital Catapult and West Midlands 5G to be the contact points for industry to engage with government and the various projects and will replace the existing UK5G activity. This follows similar moves by the regulator in the US.
The UKTIN is intended to guide businesses and researchers through the UK R&D ecosystem, including directions for relevant funding and investment opportunities, R&D facilities and testbeds, as well as providing high-level insight on how to engage with the opportunity, fund or facilities.
“The seamless connectivity and blistering speeds of 5G and then 6G will power a tech revolution which will enrich people’s lives and fire up productivity across the economy,” said Digital Infrastructure Minister Matt Warman. “It’s why we’re investing millions and partnering with international allies to unleash innovation and develop new ways to make these networks more secure, resilient and less reliant on a handful of suppliers.”
The UK government is already supporting 15 projects with £36m through the Future RAN Competition (FRANC) to help accelerate the development of subcomponents and market models for open interface architectures. This is focussing on developing technical solutions such as radio transmitters, signal processing equipment, power management systems and software to support open interface architectures. The projects are spread across the UK, including in Glasgow, Cardiff, Cambridge, Newcastle, Newport, Slough and Ebbw Vale.
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