ONE WORD. A project to bring the benefits of 5G SA HDD coverage to Cardiff’s Indoor Market, the City of Bath, the community space of Quarry Park and the UK’s oldest motorsport venue of Shelsley Walsh. The consortium will develop new solutions around small cells and AI based RIC technology to address the issues of providing coverage in areas, each of which presents its own challenges.

Using machine learning the RIC will predict the need for spectrum, capacity and power. This will meet the issues of significant fluctuations in usage around the urban environment of the city of Cardiff and the rural location of Shelsley Walsh.

Working with local authorities in the West of England, the programme will address the need to integrate modern mobile technology within the historic world heritage City of Bath.

Access to the network will be made available for regular users via pSim and eSim. Test events will be staged driving at least 2000 trialists through the network to provide high demand simulations.

The project will be led by Telet Research (NI) Limited which will provide the Open RAN systems integration, the core network and management of the project. The Open RAN will consist of Remote Radio Units from Reading based Antevia, integrated to work with Centralised Units and Distributed Units from Radisys, which will also provide the MOCN gateway to implement an industry standard JOTS compliant Neutral Host. Further radio equipment will be supplied by cellXica which will work with the project to integrate its small cells in the Open RAN environment.

ONE WORD will leverage the advanced features of a 5G SA through the use of XApps developed by consortium partner The University of Lancaster. These XApps will provide improved spectrum utilisation and energy efficiency.

Virtuser Business Communication Services Ltd will provide support for a number of use cases around tacking and sensing.

The project enjoys significant support from local authorities who are increasingly recognising the value of better connectivity. It will bring together Bath and North East Somerset Council, Worcestershire County Council, Shropshire County Council and Cardiff Council. They will work through the Community Interest Company Neutral Host Networks. With support from MVNO IQ Mobile, Neutral Host Networks CIC will buy and hold the network assets. Western Gateway, a pan-regional local government umbrella organisation for South Wales and the West of England will lead in public policy.