AT&T and the RELLIS Campus of Texas A&M will make available private 5G testbeds to public and private sector organizations this fall, the carrier and university said today in a joint announcement. The testbeds will be used to develop 5G applications and solutions.
Commercial customers will be able to access the testbeds to explore a wide range of uses, including autonomous and connected vehicles, robotics, roadside safety and physical security, large-scale infrastructure, autonomous agriculture, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
With the 5G testbeds, the RELLIS Campus will have one of the large-scale testing and evaluation sites for five of the Department of Defense’s 11 modernization priorities: hypersonics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber security and directed energy.
The first organizations to use the testbeds will be Texas A&M System and state agencies – Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), and Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX). They will experiment with a variety of autonomous vehicle, roadside safety, augmented reality, virtual reality and robotics use cases.
“This new 5G testbed will be one of the most advanced university based 5G testbeds in the country,” said Brad Hoover, The RELLIS campus chief information officer, in a prepared statement about the AT&T 5G testbed. “Bringing together the private and public sectors, the RELLIS 5G testbeds can test 5G technologies at scale utilizing both on road and off-road terrains through 5G mmWave and Sub-6 frequencies. These testbeds are being set up to test new approaches to augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles or any number of use cases as well as those that have yet to be imagined.”
Earlier this year, AT&T partnered with the University of Connecticut in another lab collaboration.
