Huawei and its European partners are collaborating to create a unified 5G infrastructure for Europe, in order to underpin all future cloud and networking services. It aims to make 5G so harmonised across Europe that the set up time for a new service will drop from 90 days today to 90 minutes in the 5G future.

The 5GExchange project (5Gex), which was launched in October, aims to use multi-domain orchestration to create a software-defined infrastructure. It is one of the first projects to come out of the European 5G Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) which aims to foster research and global cooperation in managing future wireless demand.

In order to standardise services, Huawei is working with 16 European partners, including network operators, vendors, SMEs and academic institutions, to establish a pan-European testbed for evaluating relevant technologies. By integrating multiple operators and technologies Huawei aims to get all the stakeholders pulling together, harmonising their efforts and achieving economies of scale.

Over the course of the project, various operators and vendors will host and connect technically diverse test sites across Europe. The target of the system developed under the project will be to connect these sites, enabling service providers to deploy new on-demand, end-to-end infrastructure and services at the click of a button, and make these available to customers as soon as possible. Huawei has set itself the target to cut the time to market for a new pan-European 5G service from 90 days to 90 minutes. The first step will be to help European researchers and industrial partners test the 5G services and experiments they developed within the 5G-PPP framework.

The 5G-PPP is a joint initiative between Europe’s ICT industry and the European Commission. According to 5G-PPP will receive private funding of €3.5 billion with an additional €700 million from the EU funding.

The company’s European Research Centre (Huawei ERC) is to design and develop a prototype 5GEx multi-domain orchestrator. ERC is currently participating in five EU-funded projects.

In the UK Huawei is investing £5million in Surrey University’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) as part of the $600 million it is committing to 5G research globally by 2018.

Discover the latest developments on the road to 5G at 5G World in London 28-30 June 2016