Industry Views on emerging Open 5G/6G Research Infrastructures & Toolkits

There is now doubt, that the introduction of 5G has challenged many operators around the globe in order to get to a return of their infrastructure investments. Besides big hopes for innovative services in many industry verticals facing the digital transformation, 5G proved to be to complex and expensive. The expected eco system development is legging behind and local experts need to be educated around the globe. Open multi-vendor labs have been established in the past years to reach out to academia and industry to enable skill development and early prototyping of innovative solutions based on the newest 5G technologies.

The new 6G aims to learn from the 5G dilemma and might get even more complex due to the seamless integration of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) and the use of AI in various domains in and above the communication nations network. Also new use cases driven by robots, drones, and integrated communications and sensing create additional complexities for test labs. The notion of digital sovereignty in different regions of the world adds for sure additional challenges.

In this panel we want to discuss best practices and challenges to be mastered for establishing successful open / vendor-independent Research Infrastructures & Toolkits for 5G and the evolution from towards 6G.