Nevion Jumps Aboard EU-Funded 5G-VINNI Project With BT & Telenor

Nevion is involved in the External Stakeholder Board (ESB) of the EU-funded 5G-VINNI (“5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure”) initiative headed by Norwegian telecom service provider Telenor. Working together with project member British Telecom (BT), the UK-based telecom service provider, Nevion is helping evaluate the performance of 5G (the Fifth Generation of Cellular Network Technology) for use in agile media production for broadcasting.

At the invitation of BT, Nevion joined the 5G-VINNI in September 2019 as an external expert and a member of the stakeholder board. As well as expertise in the field of media transport, Nevion is also contributing to the project with the provision of its orchestration and SDN control software VideoIPath and its software-defined media node Virtuoso.

The 5G-VINNI initiative comprises 23 partners including major operators, academia and industry vendors. The overall objective 5G-VINNI project is to accelerate the uptake of 5G in Europe by providing an end-to-end (E2E) facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies by operating trials of advanced vertical sector services. 5G-VINNI is run at four main sites located in Norway, UK, Spain and Greece.

Nevion has been working closely with BT on the Adastral Park Campus in Ipswich, UK, on which both companies have a significant R&D presence. The initial phases are qualifying the inherent performance of 5G technology, looking both at the data plane (the transport of media over the network) and the control plane (managing the flow of media). Once the qualification is completed, the project will move to proof of concept trials.

Paul Muschamp at BT explains: “There is a lot of interest in many industries in 5G, and broadcasting is no exception. The technology offers the potential to create a more agile live media production. The requirements for that application are quite exceptional though, in terms of high data volume, low latency and no tolerance for transmission failure. This makes live media production an great test of the performance of 5G, which is the objective of 5G-VINNI.”

Andy Rayner, Chief Technologist, Nevion adds: “Whilst 5G capabilities are already provided by some service providers across the world, many of the key technology elements essential for agile mobile media production are yet to mature. Nevion is really pleased to be helping the 5G-VINNI project identify the areas that need to be developed.”

Separately, Nevion is leading another EU-funded 5G project, called 5G-VIRTUOSA, which is looking into Scalable Software Defined Network architectures for cooperative live media production exploiting virtualized production resources and 5G wireless acquisition.

The 5G-VINNI project has received funding from the European Horizon 2020 Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement n° 815279.