Ericsson And King's College London Partner Up To Test 5G

King’s College London and communications technology firm Ericsson announced today they’re partnering up to research the 5G mobile Internet.

Research will address both technical implications and societal challenges towards the development of a tactile internet, it says in the official press release.

The experiments will include setting up a 5G Tactile Internet Lab with test bed capabilities, enabling the easy creation, testing and real-time adaptation radio technology in software.

This will occur both in devices and remotely as part of Cloud RAN experimentation.

There will also be a 5G Tactile Internet showroom which will showcase developed prototypes and connect to real-time live test beds in London and globally.

Professor Mischa Dohler, Head of King’s College London’s Centre for Telecommunications Research in the Department of Informatics, says: “In addition to ground-breaking telecommunications paradigms, computer science, such as innovative artificial intelligence and edge-cloud technologies,  and robotics, such as novel edge-haptics, will be used to pioneer the Tactile Internet, which is one of many opportunities that 5G will enable.

“Currently we can see and hear through the Internet, but we cannot touch – we have a vision to create the Tactile Internet, where we would be able to touch through the medium of the internet.”

5G is expected to begin its commercial rollout in 2020, by which time Ericsson believes that there will be up to 50 billion connected devices in the world, mainly in machine-to-machine communication.

5G networks will enable a wide variety of use cases such as evolved mobile broadband services, a range of machine-to-machine communication and media distribution.