Test and Measurement: Keysight supports pan-European 6G testbed

Keysight Technologies is joining with 16 other companies and organizations to coordinate a European 6G testbed program, the 6G-SANDBOX program funded by Horizon Europe to help promote a European supply chain for advanced wireless systems.

6G-SANDBOX is one of 35 new projects, funded to the tune of about 250 million euros, that are part of the European Commission’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking, established in 2021. The overarching project seeks to develop “EU-wide experimentation platforms to test promising technical 6G enablers,” Keysight noted, such as network intelligence, artificial intelligence, security, flexible multi-tenancy architecture, digital twins, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.

Keysight said that the 6G testbed will “combine digital and physical nodes to deliver fully configurable, manageable, and controllable end-to-end networks for validating new technologies and research advancements for 6G.” It will not be a single testbed location, but rather four experimental platforms—one each in Spain, Germany, Finland and Greece–that will allow organizations to conduct testing and trials.

In other test news:

–Airspan Networks plans to expand its 5G Innovation Lab in Tokyo due to scaling adoption of Open RAN in the Asia-Pacific region. Read more here.

–Keysight and Qualcomm Technologies said this week that they successfully established an end-to-end, satellite-to-ground 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) connection, demonstrating call signaling and data transfer in Qualcomm’s San Diego lab using Keysight 5G base station and aerospace emulation solutions along with a 5G smartphone reference design from Qualcomm as a test device. Keysight noted that its solutions are used by the aerospace industry to design and validate satellites, and that its emulation capabilities can compensate for the high Doppler effect and time delays that occur due to the high altitude and speed at which satellites travel.

The two companies said that they “aim to accelerate 5G NTN technology to provide affordable broadband connectivity in remote areas.”

–Ookla says that global mobile network speeds increased nearly 17% between 2021 and 2022, and wireline speeds jumped even more. Read the full story here.

–MediaTek and Federated Wireless say that they have completed interoperability testing for Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) on MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6E chips; Federated is conditionally approved by the Federal Communications Commission to operate an AFC system for the 6 GHz band.

-Radio frequency components provider Pasternack has unveiled a new series of high-performance power amplifiers covering broadband frequency ranges from 1.5 MHz to 18 GHz; they are designed for test and measurement, telecom and aerospace and defense applications.