UK's first national testbed platform for 6G and Future Networks experimentation

“We’ve brought together a community of researchers who are active in different areas of telecoms innovation: some researching new fibres, some working on next-generation wireless solutions, some developing new software platforms, others offering AI solutions for optimising equipment or services. For all of them, the experimental evidence that they need is beyond what you get when you evaluate a new technology or solution on its own in a lab environment.”

JOINER will provide a national-scale telecommunications network testbed, with similar characteristics that a standard telecoms network can provide. It will enable researchers both to test their research prototypes at scale and to collaborate with each other, combining resources and sharing insights, bridging the gap between experimenters, services and equipment. The infrastructure will also generate huge amounts of monitoring data, making it possible to answer new research questions in telecoms, which are questions of scale: how much energy is used across a network, for example, or where within a network is it most important to utilise cyber security solutions rather than physical or (emerging) quantum security solutions.

JOINER will enable researchers both to test their research prototypes at scale and to collaborate with each other, combining resources and sharing insights, bridging the gap between experimenters, services and equipment

For Dimitra Simeonidou, JOINER creates a unique telecoms infrastructure in the UK. “In effect we are creating a new scientific instrument for network research: JOINER gives us a research asset that we never had before.”

JOINER will connect eleven University research labs initially. The next step will be to go beyond research labs and engage the innovation ecosystems around them: most of the universities that JOINER is connecting have vibrant spin-out clusters associated with them. The ambition is to have JOINER’s infrastructure up-and-running by the end of the year, in time for the UK’s first 6G demonstrations early next year. Through the intellectual property that JOINER will help to generate, and the advanced skills that it helps to develop, JOINER not only promises to enhance the UK's position as a leader in telecom innovation, but also to help to strengthen the UK’s global lead on multi-technology 6G demonstrations.

“Together we can help to shape what 6G will look like,” says Dimitra Simeonidou. “This will be an important catalyst for UK telecoms research: we’re all very excited about it.”