5G and autonomous vehicles: a visit to the UK's new testbed

Back in March of last year, Land Mobile reported on the results of a competition run by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, through which £25m was awarded to six projects around the country in order to help them “pave the way for future 5G roll-out”.

As related at the time, the scope of these projects covered a variety of potential use-cases, situated in a number of different environments, again spread out across the UK. They included, in no particular order, 5G Rural First, 5G ‘smart tourism’, Liverpool 5G – which is focusing on healthcare – the Worcestershire 5G Consortium, and something called the 5G rural integrated testbed.

As exciting as all those projects have the potential to be, possibly the most glamorous, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, however, is the AutoAir 5G testbed, recently rolled out at Millbrook proving ground in Bedfordshire.

Autonomous and connected vehicles are, after all, the headline use-case for advocates of next-generation mobile broadband technology, as well as the thing which the public seems to be most excited about (alongside massively increased data rates for downloading episodes of Game of Thrones).