Zeetta Networks leads £9m Industrial 5G Project

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

Bristol, UK: 20 February 2020

• Zeetta Networks is announced as the consortium lead for the £9m 5G-ENCODE project that will deliver a private 5G network at the National Composites Centre (NCC)
• This is the UK government’s biggest investment in 5G for manufacturing to date as part of DCMS’ Industrial 5G Testbeds and Trials programme
• The project consortium consists of 11 partners including Telefonica, Toshiba, Siemens, Solvay, and Baker Hughes
• 5G-ENCODE project will explore new business models and value propositions for enterprise private 5G networks in an industrial environment and test new 5G technologies such as network splicing and slicing in a real operating setting

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 ground breaking 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.

Technical details

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.

Find out more about Zeetta Networks’ advanced networking software on their website (www.zeetta.com) or follow on Twitter via @ZeettaNetworks.

ENDS

Notes to editors
For all press enquiries and to arrange an interview, please contact PR admin at: admin@zeetta.com

About Zeetta Networks

Zeetta Networks simplifies network operations and improves the efficiency of a network with intelligence and automation. As an industry thought leader Zeetta Networks has been recognised by a number of industry bodies through their awards programmes including the GSMA’s Global Mobile (GLOMO) Awards, TMF’s Excellence Awards and the 5G World Awards. In 2019 Zeetta Networks was recognised as a “Gartner Cool Vendor” for Communications Service Provider Network Operations.

About the National Composites Centre (NCC)

NCC is one of seven centres that form the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC). It works globally to accelerate the adoption of high-value, sustainable engineering solutions in composites by providing products and services to the UK’s aviation, automotive, renewable energy and other high-tech industries.

About the 5G-ENCODE Project

Industry 4.0 is the next industrial revolution. The use of technology in the UK’s manufacturing industry is set to increase productivity and efficiency, giving the country a clear technological advantage.

Zeetta, a UK technology company, has been selected to lead the £9m DCMS-funded 5G-ENCODE project at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in Bristol, UK. The NCC is one of seven centres that form the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC). It works globally to accelerate the adoption of high-value, sustainable engineering solutions in composites by providing products and services to the UK’s aviation, automotive, renewable energy and other high-tech industries.

Zeetta is leading a consortium of eleven companies including Telefonica, Siemens, Toshiba, Solvay and Baker Hughes, and is also one of the key technology providers to the project.

Zeetta will be offering its multi-domain orchestration technology based on 5G network splicing™ and slicing. Network slicing is the ability to define and provide prioritised, partitioned and protected sub-networks to ensure that business and time-critical systems can run over shared infrastructure without interference.

Network splicing™ is a unique concept developed by Zeetta that allows network slices to be joined in sequence to extend reach for the provision of a continuous service. These technologies will play an important role in manufacturing applications, particularly where assets must be tracked across multiple sites, geographic locations and indoor and outdoor environments. The project will prove that this capability is an essential enabler for the wider adoption of 5G in the industrial sector.

The 5G-ENCODE project will also examine new business models for private mobile networks in the manufacturing sector. These would include neutral hosting, the sharing of in-building infrastructure by mobile operators to provide ubiquitous coverage inside buildings and spectrum pooling and sharing where licensed and unlicensed spectrum could be shared amongst private and public network operators.

The project aims to examine the utility of these business model to understand the most cost-effective method of delivering 5G in an industrial setting.

The project will investigate three key industrial 5G use cases to improve productivity and effectiveness of composite design and manufacture.

• The first use case is to improve training and maintenance in composite manufacture using interactive augmented reality (AR).
• The second use case addresses the challenge of tracking time-critical assets across multiple sites and locations indoor and outdoor, and potentially across national borders. Network splicing™ will be a key enabling technology in supporting this use case.
• The final use case will leverage 5G’s ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) to manage industrial systems that are more responsive than current network technology allows, preventing wastage in manufacturing.

Each of these use cases has the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds across the UK manufacturing sector and increasing productivity.

The 5G-ENCODE project will start in February 2020 and will run until March 2022.