Digital Catapult is the UK’s leading advanced digital technology innovation centre, driving early adoption of technologies to make UK businesses more competitive and productive to grow the country’s economy.We connect large established companies, startup and scaleup businesses and researchers to discover new ways to address big challenges in the manufacturing and creative industries. Through this collaboration businesses are supported to develop the right technologies to solve problems, increase productivity and open up new markets faster.Digital Catapult provides physical and digital facilities for experimentation and testing that would otherwise not be accessible for smaller companies.As well as breaking down barriers to technology adoption for startups and scaleups, our work de-risks innovation for large enterprises and uncovers new commercial applications in immersive, future networks, and artificial intelligence technologies. For more info please visit www.digicatapult.org.uk
The testbed
Digital Catapult 5G Testbed is a three-site facility, geographically distributed across Brighton and London, technologically complete end-to-end, equipped with commercial and open source protocol stacks, offering open access and technical support to third party companies that want to test and develop 5G-enabled services and applications. The three sites are interconnected with 1Gbps links. In addition, the London node is interconnected with the 5G University Test Network (5GUK) through the 5GUKExchange.
Technical Details:
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Technical Details:
Locations (indoor only):
● Brighton Dome and Corn Exchange (1200m2),
● Brighton Fusebox (650m2),
● Digital Catapult London (120 – 600m2)
Spectrum:
● B7 (15 & 20MHz), B8, B5, 3.4-3.6GHz (5G) NOD licence (Ofcom)
Connectivity & computing hardware
● 18 LTE small cells (Airspan)
● 5GNR (3GPP Rel.15)
● LTE-M, 2 NB-IoT eNBs
● eMBMS
● 18 WiFi nodes (Cisco Meraki and Ruckus)
● 14 switches (10 SDN)
● >1400 cores compute (Dell & OCP Inspired™ QuantaGrid servers)
● 1Gbps intersite connectivity
● 1Gbps Janet connection with NetPath2 representation in Virtus 5GUKEx
● 3 PaloAlto enterprise firewalls
Software
● Commercial LTE core with local breakout (Quortus)
● 5G NSA Cores (Open5GCore and Amarisoft)
● OpenStack
● OSM (modified with University of Bristol)
● Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana)
Devops-enabled operations
● Ansible scripts to commision protocol stacks
● MAAS
User equipment
● 5G Phones (Samsung Galaxy S10 5G)
● 4G Phones (Samsung Galaxy S10, Google Pixel 3)
● 4G modem (mini-PCIe/USB Interface)
● NB-IoT, LTE-M development module
