MFA, an international organization dedicated to enabling industry verticals to deploy private cellular networks globally, today announced the completion of the Uni5G Technology Blueprints. This initial set of three blueprint families provides guidance to industry verticals and enterprises on the key functionalities to implement from 3GPP Release 15 to meet their specific requirements for coverage, reliability, connection density, and latency for their deployment. By focusing and implementing selected features from the Uni5G blueprint families, industry verticals can simplify their path to 5G private networks.
“Globally, there is a growing trend for industry verticals such as manufacturing, warehouses and logistics, ports, and more to deploy 4G and 5G private networks to gain the benefits of increased automation and digitalization, However, these industry verticals are not telecom experts and may not know where to start. By creating the Uni5G Technology Blueprints that map the 3GPP features they need for the functionality they want, MFA is providing a valuable tool for these industry verticals to share with device and equipment manufacturers to obtain the features that are required fulfill their objectives.”
Mazen Chmaytelli, president, MFA
The first Uni5G Technology Blueprints release includes three blueprint families that map 3GPP features to requirements for coverage, reliability, connection density, and latency. For example, if a shipping port requires reliability and coverage, it can leverage the Uni5G blueprint to understand which features from Release 15 that it needs to implement for either a basic device or an advanced device. MFA will continue to evolve the Uni5G Technology Blueprints to stay in step with 3GPP releases.
The Uni5G Technology Blueprints are available now to MFA members. To be notified when the blueprints become available publicly, sign up here.
Caroline Chan, VP Network and Edge Group, GM Network Business Incubation Division of Intel Corporation, said: “This is an important and timely contribution to the global scaling of private network solutions across a range of sectors. These blueprints, when implemented on Intel’s proven FlexRAN reference architecture and Intel Xeon processors, can help enterprises simplify the path to deploy key features for their 5G private networks.”
Stephan Litjens, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia Cloud and Networking Services, said: “Successful adoption and use of private wireless 5G by industry is largely dependent on the healthy growth of the 5G device ecosystem and automation enablers. Through its pioneering work on Uni5G blueprints, MFA is providing industry with clear guidance on how to achieve this. Uni5G blueprints will be an invaluable tool for verticals and industry players to identify what key features are necessary to optimize and enhance industrial applications that facilitate automation goals.”
Dr. Edward Tiedemann, Senior Vice-President, Engineering, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., said: “The emergence of 5G private networks is opening up exciting new opportunities for verticals to connect various equipment. It is great to see MFA putting in place critical support to demystify the process of deploying 5G private networks—first with the network identifier program and now with blueprints that will help the ecosystem align on requirements for different 5G private network use cases.”
About MFA
MFA is an international organization that is championing the global industry adoption of private networks using MFA-defined MulteFire® specifications for LTE and Uni5G Technology Blueprints for 5G. With Uni5G or MulteFire, enterprises can efficiently deploy their own optimized, reliable and secure private network in unlicensed, shared or locally licensed spectrum.