The UK’s trinity of 5G

Sam Fenwick explores some of the 5G research that is under way in the UK and its many applications, from balancing robots to making music

Last year, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) awarded £16m to the Universities of Surrey, Bristol and King’s College London to fund the creation of a 5G test network, to be comprised of three small-scale mobile networks. Over the next few pages, we’ll get a feel for what each of these research groups has been up to, their areas of focus and the use-cases they’ve been exploring.

Our story starts with a trip to the University of Surrey’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC). Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC, and Stuart Revell, managing director of RTACS Ltd, which is working with the 5GIC on definition, external engagement, and 5G and IoT adoption, are on hand to show me around.

Tafazolli wastes no time, quickly ushering me into a room (shown overleaf) where a two-wheeled robot is performing a delicate balancing act made only possible by a feedback/control loop run between a cloud-based edged computing application, a 5G base station on a pole outside the building running at 3.5GHz, and a prototype 5G user equipment device connecting the robot to the network.