Equinix boosts 5G and Edge Ecosystem Innovation with Nokia

Global digital infrastructure company Equinix has announced it has deployed a first-of-its-kind, fully functional 5G and Edge Technology Development Center which includes a fully operational, non-standalone 5G network from Nokia to test and validate various 5G services and use cases. 

Equinix is investing in helping service providers and network operators bring innovative concepts to market by providing an agile production framework for assessing, incubating, and testing 5G and edge solutions for end-to-end secure applications.

Russell Poole, Managing Director, UK, Equinix, said: “Emerging edge use cases require a fundamental change in underlying digital infrastructure. Equinix is investing heavily to help our customers enhance their existing infrastructure and lay the groundwork for full edge functionality. If a customer in the UK wants to trial an edge use case, they can do so through our Equinix Solution Validation Centers, where companies can validate transformational 5G and edge technologies.”

“As companies develop new 5G technologies and services, they need a real-world environment to test and bring their concepts to life,” said Justin Dustzadeh, CTO, Equinix. “With Equinix’s rich ecosystem of service providers, partners, and clouds, the 5G and Edge Technology Development Center is an ideal place to fully test their concepts in a real way, enabling them to bring new capabilities to market, accelerate adoption and deliver new revenue streams faster.”

Sean Hemphill, Vice President of Webscale Business at Nokia, said: “As we look to a future where 5G is ubiquitous, the way that IP traffic moves between networks around the world will change completely, and interconnected data centers will play a crucial role in this new 5G-dominated future.”

5G Edge Technology Development Center

The 5G and Edge Technology Development Center, which is located at Equinix’s DA11 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centre in Dallas, brings together select ecosystem participants to develop end-to-end edge solutions by providing a production-ready interconnection sandbox environment from the radio network to the cloud. Mobile network operators (MNOs), cloud platforms, technology vendors, and enterprises come together at Equinix to test, demonstrate and accelerate complex 5G and edge scenarios—key activities that will make 5G deployments available to enterprises in the future. 

The 5G and Edge Technology Development Center will initially focus on the following use cases:  

•  Mobile Hybrid Multicloud Connectivity: Assessing strategies for ensuring that 5G user traffic can reach multiple clouds and hybrid edge computing resources, effectively and efficiently.
• Network Slicing: Aiming to facilitate private wireless enterprise networks supporting secure, predictable, end-to-end quality of experience.
• Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Investigating the optimisation of AI/ML applications and infrastructure distributed across the edge, directly connected to 5G, and interconnected to clouds for enabling data-dense capabilities, such as scene and video analytics.
• Enablement and Orchestration of Infrastructure: Exploring optimal deployment strategies for 5G RAN, fronthaul, core and edge computing infrastructure, and functions management across domains.
•  Augmented and Virtual Reality: Validating a uniform experience, consistent quality, and anywhere usage with high mobility and high motion.
• Gaming: Demonstrating responsive hosted gaming, low-latency peripherals leveraging the metro edge for delivery.

Equinix says it is “actively standing up novel 5G use cases.” The first use case is Secure Edge from Exium, which enables highly secure, seamless multi-access edge compute functionality with tightly integrated security and network functions from the cloud, to edge locations, to the devices themselves. 

 Jim Poole, VP Business Development, Equinix, said: “We’re excited to invite private enterprises, commercial organisations, and researchers across industries to test, validate and accelerate complex 5G deployments and interoperability scenarios.”

Image: Equinix