Bristol 5G Trial

Three-week 5G mobile edge computing trial in Bristol was a success.

20:19 15 August 2017

Bristol Council’s long-running smart city project has advanced to the next stage as its three-week mobile edge computing (MEC) technology trial has successfully concluded. MEC is expected to play a crucial part in the establishment of 5G network architectures that will bring extremely fast Wifi mobile connection.

 

The trial was conducted with the help of the University of Bristol and CTVC, a documentary production company, as well as InterDigital, a network solutions supplier.

 

The trial was open to any member of the public using an Android device. Participants took part in a virtual treasure hunt around the city centre to find hidden treasures and solve video riddles related to their location.

 

Dirk Trossen, InterDigital senior principal engineer, said: “Latency reduction, higher bandwidth utilisation, and the ability to deploy such services very close to end-users rather than in some distant cloud are crucial to the success of MEC services.”

 

“This trial showcases the solutions that can deliver those performance improvements under realistic conditions and with real users fulfilling the highest criteria of trials in the 5G world.”

 

CTVC’s Stuart Porter added: “Deploying services so close to end-users is crucial to enable new services at the network edge, but even more important is doing so without the need for deploying own infrastructure in operators’ networks.”