Ericsson has announced new collaborations with two leading universities in Europe - King's College London and Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden) with an aim to focus on 5G research. The research will address both the technical implications and the societal challenges of implementing the next-generation of communications technology. The collaborations will build on other leading European research institutes and university collaborations in the 5G sphere, such as those with the Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University in Sweden.
Ericsson is also leading the EU project METIS (Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society) and been a driving force of 5G PPP (5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership), in which vendors, operators and players from industries such as the automotive, utilities and automation sectors are working closely together.
5G is expected to begin its commercial rollout in 2020, by which time Ericsson believes that there will be up to 50 billion connected devices in the world, mainly in machine-to-machine communication space. 5G networks will enable a wide variety of use cases such as evolved mobile broadband services, machine-to-machine communication and media distribution. These services will demand diverse requirements on the performance of the networks.
