Digital Infrastructure company, Equinix announced the deployment of a first-of-its-kind, fully functional 5G and Edge Technology Development Center, including a fully operational, non-standalone 5G network from Nokia which aims to test and validate various 5G services and use cases. With the investment, the company is helping customers to bring innovative concepts by providing an agile production framework for assessing, incubating, and testing 5G and edge solutions.
5G and edge ecosystem innovation
The 5G and Edge Technology Development Center is located at the company’s DA11 International Business Exchange data center in Dallas. The facility brings select ecosystem participants together to develop end-to-end edge solutions by providing a production-ready interconnection sandbox environment. The facility will focus on these 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 optimization 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.
Justin Dustzadeh, CTO of Equinix said,
“As companies develop new 5G technologies and services, they need a real-world environment to test and bring their concepts to life. 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.”