MYCOM OSI joins UK's 5G Initiative

Around the world we are still for the most part in the nascent stages of 4G LTE (News - Alert) rollouts.  However, as the now concluding Mobile World Congress 2015 (MWC) event in Barcelona has shown there is already momentum building around what comes next. In fact, 5G visions and the start of ecosystem and research consortiums are already gathering steam as witnessed by the announcement from service assurance solutions provider MYCOM OSI that it was joining the leading U.K. research initiative on 5G, The University of Surrey’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC).

5G on the move

What MYCOM OSI will be providing is not only its suite of service assurance solutions but insights from its work in the areas with eight out of the top 10 global communications service providers (CSPs). This includes its deep expertise around managing and optimizing network and service performance and quality.  

This effort by the University of Surrey is one to keep an eye on. MYCOM OSI joins an industry consortium that counts among its members BT, EE, Telefonica and Vodafone (News - Alert) to research the development of advanced technologies for a 5G network with the goal of enabling the U.K. to establish a world-leading position in mobile broadband communications and internet innovations.

One of the areas of contribution will involve the complex issues of migrating smoothly and cost effectively from one generation of capabilities to another. This is an area of sensitivity that operators are well aware of based on all of the generational migrations that have occurred in the past few decades.  As MYCOM OSI points outs it will consider, “Pragmatic best practices for rolling out 5G within the context of existing network technologies like 3G, 4G, HetNet and virtualized networks such as NFV, SDN, C-RAN.” The company it helping its partner by providing it full Service Assurance suite which includes Performance Management, Fault Management, Service Management, Network Analytics and Intelligent Automation.

 “The 5G charter is about providing huge bandwidth, low latency and always-on reliability to feed not only the subscriber traffic explosion but also massive amounts of new M2M and IoT applications,” said Payam Taaghol, CEO of MYCOM OSI.  “Service assurance will have a critical part to play because it has the job of managing the network to deliver quality, performance and availability. MYCOM OSI has always invested ahead of time in upcoming technologies so we are very pleased to be able to join the University of Surrey’s 5GIC initiative.”

“We welcome MYCOM OSI to the 5GIC and thank them for their contribution that goes a long way towards completion of our 5G ecosystem partners. The ability to be able to monitor the network and the services on an end-to-end basis is critical for evaluation and development of innovative 5G technologies,” added Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Head of 5GIC.  “MYCOM OSI’s solution will help us with implementation and real-time visualization of performance of our innovative network/signaling architectures and its optimization for many critical KPIs such as low latency, high resilience and reliability, energy efficiency, Quality of Experience and Service and many more parameters.  It is invaluable to have a company of MYCOM OSIs stature and telecom network experience as a partner in the 5GIC. ”

Take note of that last part of the quote from Professor Tafazolli.  Next generation signaling is going to be required for 5G when it comes if networks resources and user experiences are to be optimized. We may only be in the R&D phase of 5G but it is reassuring to know that signaling is a top priority from the start.