Mavenir on Tuesday announced that BAI Communications (BAI), a global communications infrastructure provider, will be launching a Smart City project for Sunderland City Council in the north of England (UK), powered by Mavenir’s MAVedge solution.
BAI Communications will build a new 5G centric network to accelerate adoption of transformative digital services for sectors including manufacturing and logistics, education and social care. The initial scope is for the deployment of a city-centre 5G private network which has the potential to evolve and become a neutral host network.
Neutral host models provide coverage and connectivity for smart city initiatives. They enable local councils and authorities to provide smart services and run numerous smart community applications in a more viable and cost-effective manner.
MAVedge comprises Mavenir’s leading edge Open vRAN and 5G Packet Core solutions to drive the next generation digital transformation of this Smart City project, and to provide advanced 5G mobile connectivity to the local Sunderland community. MAVedge enables secure private networks to be distributed at the edge and powers a digital marketplace of applications and devices to create an efficient environment for diverse use cases for the enterprise and industry.
The 5G Open vRAN and 5G Packet Core solutions are designed with cloud-native virtualisation techniques providing a fully scalable and virtualised network architecture with open standard interfaces. The Open RAN platform provides BAI Communications the option of deploying radio units from different vendors. The solution uses software running on commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware that provides cost effectiveness, flexibility and agility, whilst delivering one architecture as a baseline for many different use cases.
Brendan O’Reilly, Group Chief Technology Officer at BAI Communications
We are delighted to work with Mavenir, a technology innovator company in cloud-native virtualised solutions and a leading player in the Open RAN initiative and 5G Core. Technology we believe will help accelerate Sunderland’s ambitions to become one of the UK’s most advanced smart cities, connecting people, communities and businesses.
Stefano Cantarelli, Chief Marketing Officer at Mavenir
Together, we will be able to build new RAN and Packet Core domains that will deliver the flexibility needed for a diverse set of cross-sector use cases. Virtualised solutions from Mavenir are the perfect choice of technology with Open vRAN and Cloud-Native Packet Core. The objective is to automate operations and flex the scalability in neutral hosting architecture, whilst delivering benefits not only to enterprises and business users, but also for the wider community.
