Cellnex Pushes Cross Border 5G Limits with 5GMED
One of the best aspects of Mobile World Congress is uncovering interesting use cases and deployments of the latest technology. That’s why I was so excited to talk to Cellnex’s Jose Lopez Luque about his company’s engagement with the EU funded 5GMED project. 5GMED is testing resilient connection across borders for low latency, high bandwidth service delivery. Cellnex is a leading tower provider and a core participant in 5GMED focused on the France Spain border.
Why is this a focus point? 5G’s full promise delivers increased performance at the edge for services like autonomous driving or in vehicle infotainment. Those of us who travel internationally are all too familiar with the text message that comes from crossing a border stating the new carrier who is providing service and the small lag in connectivity that precedes its arrival. It’s this small lag, a tolerable nuisance for for text and talk connections, that becomes a deal breaker for more demanding applications like video transcoding at the edge. If you happen to be watching a streaming movie while a passenger of a train or car crossing a national border, you’re likely going to experience jitter at best or a dropped service. When you consider the low latency requirements of real time autonomous control of vehicles, you can see that even the smallest lag of connectivity can represent potential disaster.
This is what makes 5GMED so exciting as explained by Jose. With companies working together, these most demanding of network edge services are being put to the test. Cellnex is in a unique position to deliver core capability in this space as borders are likely rural environments without a tremendous amount of dedicated operator connections. A tower operator like Cellnex can deliver shared bandwidth to multiple providers delivering the connectivity and performance users need while keeping costs manageable for all providers.
With the successful delivery of 5GMED, we can expect broad proliferation of 5G access points across European borders in the near future opening the door for things like approval of autonomous vehicles in the EU. To learn more about what Cellnex is delivering in this space, check out our interview, and to learn more about 5GMED, visit the group’s website.