Zeetta Networks leads a £9m 5G Manufacturing Project in the UK

Zeetta Networks is announced as the consortium lead for a £9m Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) project to deliver clear business cases and value propositions for 5G application for the manufacturing industry.

This is the UK government’s biggest investment in 5G for manufacturing to date. Other consortia members include the National Composites Centre (NCC), Telefonica, Siemens, Toshiba, Solvay, Baker Hughes, Plataine, Mativision, University of Bristol and the West of England Combined Authority (WECA).

Launched today, the project aims to deliver real-life impact as-early-as September 2020, and will continue until March 2022 when similar commercial 5G deployments are expected across a variety of manufacturing hubs in the UK.

DCMS Secretary of State Oliver Dowden said: “5G is about more than consumers getting faster and more reliable speeds. We’re determined to harness this revolutionary technology to boost the productivity and growth of UK industries.

“We want Britain to be a world leader in 5G and since 2017 the government has invested millions in groundbreaking testbeds and trials across the country to achieve this.

“I’m pleased to welcome 5G-ENCODE to our ambitious programme and I look forward to seeing it take early advantage of 5G’s potential at the National Composites Centre in Bristol

Vassilis Seferidis, CEO of Zeetta Networks, commented: “Zeetta is proud to be leading the 5G-ENCODE project on behalf of a consortium of such renowned industrial innovators.  Our company has a strong track record in delivering 5G solutions based on our groundbreaking network splicing™ and slicing technology which are key enablers in multi-domain orchestration. The technology will be applied across public and private networks for seamless and customised delivery of 5G services. The ability to dynamically slice the resources of the network according to the demands of users and applications is a fundamental difference between 5G and previous mobile technologies and it is expected to play a transformational role in improving industrial productivity.”

Dr. Enrique Garcia, CTO at the NCC said: “As world-leaders in composite research, the NCC provides beyond state-of-the-art capabilities for industry. An industrial scale 5G test bed at the NCC will showcase a step change in security, reliability and connectivity, providing companies of all sizes a risk-free environment to evaluate and capitalise on the capabilities offered by 5G. The test bed is part our wider Digital Engineering strategy in the West of England which will form a national asset to catapult the application of digital technologies into the engineering sector. This programme affords us and our industrial partners a unique opportunity to collaborate with prominent experts in the telecommunication, digital and software industry. We are delighted to be a part of such a rare multi sectoral consortium.”

The 5G-ENCODE project will explore business cases and value propositions for 5G applications in the manufacturing industry by establishing a private 5G testbed within the NCC to explore use of Augmented/Virtual Reality applications in design and training; monitoring and tracking time-sensitive assets; and wireless real-time monitoring and analytics.

Zeetta was selected as the lead for 5G-ENCODE because its world-class expertise in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) which will be utilised in the project alongside NetOS Rapide, the company’s deployable private network solution, and its Multi-Domain Orchestrator (MDO). These technologies will manage -dynamically- the private 5G network and allow a range of different industrial applications and services to be delivered over the same network infrastructure.

Last year, Zeetta delivered excellence in two other DCMS 5G projects: RuralFirst, in a consortium including Cisco, which extended 5G connectivity to rural businesses and communities across the UK and SmartTourism, which explored tourism applications aiming to enhance visitors experience and safety using 5G technologies.