Verizon opens 5G lab and studio
Telecommunications company Verizon have opened a new 5G Lab and production studio in London. This is the company’s first 5G-ready facility outside the US and will serve as a support to the company’s international business and media customers. Now open for business the lab is based at Verizons Mid City Place office in London and is equipped with a live Verizon 5G enabled environment where organizations can develop and test applications and experiences.
The labs are designed to provide technology innovators an area to expand the 5G ecosystem. Startups, academics, companies and businesses will work with Verizon and be able to explore the many unknown possibilities of the 5G network, co-develop applications and hardware and also rethink what could be possible in a 5G universe. Potential areas of exploration could be autonomous vehicles, smart communities, virtual healthcare, IoT and so much more that can be enhanced with the wondrous super-fast speeds, massive bandwidth and low latency of 5G lab.
The London Lab allows the company to share its extensive experience and expertise in 5G enabled application delivery with businesses outside the U.S. Companies that visit the facilities are able to see existing 5G cases and experiences as they happen and can also work alongside the team at Verizon to create and develop 5G ready 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 Verizon London Lab demonstrates a range of 5G-ready use cases across a number of industries such as advertising and entertainment, education, manufacturing, medical, retail, utilities and venues. These include a mobile command center, augmented shopping experiences and AR-enabled workspace reimaging.
What’s more Verizon will open a 5G-enabled production studio in London in April 2020 which will complement the 5G lab facility. This studio will provide a space where Verizon Media’s owned and operated brands as well as their partners and customers are able to produce the highest quality 3D content (including virtual and augmented reality) experiences using advanced facilities such as volumetric capture, motion capture and AR broadcast. It is also 5G-enabled, providing an incubator space for innovative creative companies to test and learn how they can build content in the future that benefits from its capabilities to transmit massive amounts of data almost instantly.
The studio had already proved the power of 5G-enabled experiences for advertisers and media at events like 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.”