Telecoms giant Verizon has opened a new 5G Lab and production studio in London, becoming the company’s first 5G-enabled facility outside the US, to support its international business and media customers.
The Lab, which is now open for business, is based at Verizon’s Mid City Place office in central London, and offers a live Verizon 5G-enabled environment where organizations can develop and test 5G applications and experiences.
Verizon’s 5G Labs are designed to offer technology innovators a space to grow the 5G ecosystem. Start-ups, academics, companies and organizations work with Verizon in the Labs to explore the boundaries of 5G network technology, co-create new applications and hardware, and rethink what’s possible in a 5G world.
The potential use cases include exploring how autonomous vehicles, smart communities, virtual healthcare, smart manufacturing, the industrial Internet of Things, immersive education, augmented and virtual reality and responsive gaming can be enhanced with 5G’s super fast speeds, massive bandwidth and low latency.
Verizon’s London Lab enables the company to share its experience and expertise in 5G-enabled application delivery with companies based outside the U.S.. Organizations visiting the Lab can see existing 5G use cases and experiences in action, and can also work with the Verizon team to develop 5G-enabled applications.
“Verizon has proven expertise in delivering 5G in the U.S.,” said Tami Erwin, Group CEO, Verizon Business. “One of the best ways of unleashing the true possibilities of 5G is getting it into the hands of innovators and visionaries. Our London facility enables our international customers to benefit from this expertise as they look to deploy 5G-enabled applications and experiences.”
The London Lab showcases a selection of 5G-enabled use cases across a number of different verticals, including advertising and entertainment, education, manufacturing, medical, retail, utilities and venues. These include a mobile command center, an augmented shopping experience and smart retail shelving, intelligent asset management and AR-enabled workspace reimagining.
In addition, Verizon will open a 5G-enabled production studio in London in April 2020 to complement the 5G Lab facility. The studio will offer a space where Verizon Media’s owned and operated brands, as well as its partners and customers, can produce premium quality, 3D content including virtual and augmented reality experiences using state-of-the-art facilities like volumetric capture, motion capture and AR broadcast. It is also 5G-enabled, providing an incubator space for innovative creative companies to test and learn about how they can build content in the future that benefits from its capabilities to transmit massive amounts of data almost instantaneously.
Verizon Media’s RYOT studio has already demonstrated the power of 5G-enabled experiences for advertisers and media at events such as the United Nations General Assembly’s 2019 Climate Action Summit, and the Star Wars – Rise of Skywalker Premiere.
Guru Gowrappan, CEO, Verizon Media said: “Our 5G Studio, powered by RYOT’s platform, in Los Angeles was the world’s first 5G production studio when it opened last year, and now we are opening a new studio in London, offering all the same incredible next-generation content production facilities and platform. The new London studio represents our continued commitment to give our consumers access to premium next-generation experiential content across our global ecosystem of brands. As we move from a 2D world into a world that includes 3D content, Verizon Media is providing our publishers and advertisers access to a cutting-edge technology platform, giving them the ability to experiment with 5G, and providing the means to distribute them at scale.”
Verizon already operates 5G Labs in the United States in New York, Washington D.C., Cambridge, MA, San Jose, CA and Los Angeles. The company also opened a 5G First Responder Lab within its Washington DC facility, and a 5G esports training facility within its Los Angeles facility. Verizon also recently announced its engagement, along with América Móvil, KT, Rogers, Telstra and Vodafone, in the 5G Future Forum, which aims to accelerate the delivery of 5G and mobile-edge computing-enabled solutions around the world.
