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Operators - Saf Malik
June 28, 2021
Vodafone is working with Ericsson as part of the pilot
Vodafone has launched a commercial pilot of 5G standalone services in three of the UK’s biggest cities.
Building on the back of a successful trial at Coventry, Vodafone has launched the standalone 5G services in London, Manchester and Cardiff.
Vodafone claims to be the first network in the UK to trial 5G standalone, with the pilot focusing on testing new capabilities such as network slicing.
It will also help partners to test standalone-enabled devices on a live network.
Standalone 5G is expected to be the next phase of mobile network infrastructure and will deliver lower latency plus a fully virtualised cloud-native architecture.
Ericsson is working in partnership with Vodafone to support the network’s entire cloud-native 5G core standalone.
Commenting on the commercial pilot, Vodafone UK chief network officer Andrea Dona said: “Delivering 5G Standalone for the UK is an important step forward for our customers and our partners. The new features this delivers, such as new levels of reliability, latency and flexibility, are a game-changer for customers and developers looking to create new applications.
“This leadership position greatly complements our investments in Multi-access edge compute (MEC) capabilities, the Internet of Things (IoT), Mobile Private Networks (MPN) and OpenRAN.”
