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On 24 June at the impressive Wills Memorial building in Bristol, JOINER was officially launched to industry.
A significant milestone in JOINER’s journey, the day was an opportunity for exploration, discussion and networking. Ros Singleton, Chair of the JOINER advisory board explained that “JOINER is going to be foundational for so many developments over the coming years, generating new businesses and tech. As we move beyond academia, things are going to become even more interesting – we’ve not had this sort of facility before”. Setting the tone for the day, she highlighted the need for feedback and collaboration, declaring that this was the only way we could build JOINER to full effect.Here, we share our highlights.
Introducing JOINER
Amin Emani, University of Bristol, introduced JOINER and its capabilities as a multi-tenant national experimentation platform with 11 connected nodes, a nomadic terminal and three further nodes soon to be added, including the first international node in Dublin.
One of the four hubs that make up the Future Telecoms Hubs (FTH), JOINER provides an unparalleled opportunity for industry to take their solutions and try them in a broad-scale network, getting measured performance of how your product works in a realistic deployment environment. Being part of FTH also provides industry users with the ability to collaborate with a world-class research and innovation ecosystem.
Emani explained that JOINER delivers an open, programmable and feature rich infrastructure at scale, providing a great opportunity for collaboration, research translation, evidence gathering and commercialisation of innovation. Most critically, the platform is not limited to academia but designed to support the whole telco ecosystem with the ability to connect to international projects such as FABRIC in the US and EU/SNS projects.
A key emerging theme throughout Emani and other node presentations throughout the day is that JOINER is collaborative by design and that by bringing together these prestigious, advanced labs something new is being created, something that can enable system-level research and innovation that addresses end-to-end challenges.
Not only does this create a national champion to demonstrate UK capabilities and support our ambitions for standards and international collaboration, but it provides the platform in which industry can collaborate more readily and easily with academia and government, as well as host technology trials and adoption pilots.
Presentations from a number of the connected nodes, alongside Emani’s presentation gave attendees a true sense of the richness of the facilities, features and function of the JOINER platform, including:
- Network infrastructure
- Hybrid cloud
- Predefined catalogues
- Advanced research facilities
- Monitoring & analytics
- Access to the National Dark Fibre Facility
- Precise and secure time delivered by a quantum clock across the entire nation
- Cross-border collaboration and experimentation
- National spectrum facility from JOINER: enabling spectrum monitoring, playback and system emulation
- Advanced NTN emulation platform with a long-term ambition to realise real-life space labs
One of the key draws for industry is the amplifier effect JOINER has, bringing geographical, compute and technology scale and diversity at a scale not seen in the UK before. Indeed, Marco Ruffinni, from CONNECT at Trinity College Dublin, remarked that “I don’t think there is anything else that offers infrastructure at a national, and now international, scale. There is nowhere else industry could go to have this kind of experience.”
For more details on the architecture of JOINER and some of the specific capabilities of each node, you can view the slides from the day here.
Opportunities For Industry
Simon Fletcher, CEO at Real Wireless, talked to the work they are doing for JOINER identifying the engagement models for industry. He revealed that a number of industrial players are already embedding their technologies into the platform and that they will be having ongoing organisations, starting with the launch event, to bridge the gap between the system architecture that has been built and the emerging value propositions for industry.
He shared Real Wireless’ initial thinking which has identified four key ways industry can engage and benefit from JOINER:
- Connect
- Compute
- Sense and test
- Experiment and collaborate – this ‘experimentation-as-a-service’ offering is where they anticipate getting most traction around partners collaborating together, clustering common interest areas for not just the telecoms sector but industrial sectors that make up the ecosystem’s demand side.
Fletcher outlined how their industry engagement process and frameworks are coalescing around two key goals: being clear around what good looks like for industry, and exploring and co-creating business model options.
Echoing Singleton’s earlier comments, there was a clear call for the industry players in the room to engage with this process, share their requirements, concerns and the opportunities they saw, to ensure that the value propositions are refined and together we can realise JOINER’s full potential.
Industry Requirements, Expectations and Plans
Across the day a range of presentations, panel sessions and workshops gave attendees the chance to hear from and discuss plans for using JOINER, their requirements for participation and where they felt the opportunities lay. It gave rise to some fascinating conversations with a key takeaway: the possibilities for collaboration and experimentation are many and varied. With JOINER we have the ability to truly transform telecoms R&D and innovation.
It wouldn’t be a telecoms conference without some discussion around AI and Dan Warren, Director of Communications Research at Samsung R&D UK, raised the topic with a clear call to action for JOINER: platforms and network elements need to expose data in formats that can be directly correlated and unified, with interfaces that allow AI actionability in a common format.
On the theme of industry requirements, Henrik Almeida from Ericsson raised the topic of commercial terms, stating their need to be able to commercialise any innovation that emerged from any joint endeavours with academia. The topic of IP had already been identified by Fletcher as part of the scope for Real Wireless’ work in identifying exactly how industry could engage with JOINER.
Beyond the specific requirements for JOINER there was a lot of discussion of general industry needs today with a clear sign of how JOINER could address these.
Maria Lema, CEO at Weaver Labs was clear on the value that JOINER can offer to her business and other SMEs: “leveraging R&D is really key for us. Our workforce can’t tackle all the challenges we want to, so working with universities is really important for us to get to all these points. There is so much more we could do with JOINER – the infrastructure is just the beginning.”
Alessandro Pacini, Bubbleran echoed the importance of JOINER not just for the technical development it offers but the ecosystem engagement: “We truly believe in this type of openness” he said. “Not just from networking but from collaborating with others and understanding their vision. That’s the only way we can shape together 6G and the services it’s going to deliver. JOINER is the perfect example of that.”
Alex Mavromatis, Founder at Madevo focused more on the scale of JOINER and the huge appeal that has for his business: “The infrastructure for AI is being built and JOINER is the only available large scale infrastructure where we can test agentic AI for telecoms. This gives us a unique competitive advantage as an AI start-up” he said “and we’re very excited and thankful to engage with JOINER.”
And it wasn’t just the SMEs in attendance who saw value and potential in JOINER’s offering. Almeida identified “an opportunity to collaborate with operators in a real network environment that is nationwide”. He specifically identified the national spectrum facility of being of particular interest before echoing a sentiment that others had shared across the day: “this is extremely unique. I don’t see anything similar to JOINER.”
Robert Belson, AWS, highlighted that beyond the opportunities to collaborate and bring global infrastructure together, JOINER would give highly valuable data around what the telecoms community is actually building and what the pain points are. “JOINER will capture that before the analysts will” he observed, continuing that “there are unique insights that JOINER will see before anyone else does.”
Belson also noted that in his conversations with Chief Network Officers around the world, the need for robust and effective sandboxes was paramount. He excitedly shared his belief that “JOINER could become the de facto sandbox experience globally.”
It also became clear that the role of JOINER extended beyond the telecoms sector itself to demand side audiences. In a panel discussion discussing the vertical potential a number of interesting opportunities emerged.
Jess Ellis, Dido Consulting, shared her experience in the last 18 months of deploying a private 5G network at Jaguar Land Rover and talked of the huge complexity of doing so in a challenging environment. Ellis asked if JOINER could perhaps look at better ways to deploy to reduce the challenges of interference and working around clutter in these types of environments. As she remarked, “we can’t realise all these amazing use cases because we can’t get the connectivity right” before asking if JOINER could simulate and show how to manage deployments, perhaps working with real-world hospitals or factories to start tackling some of these fundamental problems.
Abdul Wahab Qurashi, AMRC, built on this by emphasising the need to have real use cases so that people can see the value. “JOINER can bring this without businesses spending a lot of money on demonstrating or understanding how something will work” he said, before concluding that JOINER could help provide the evidence and case studies to ensure “sectors can invest on implementation with confidence.”
Interestingly, Freyja Lockwood, Digital Innovation & Transformation Programme Manager at the West of England Combined Authority noted that local government was of course a potential market for connectivity use cases but that “the conversation with JOINER is more than that”. She went on to explain that local government can also be “a partner in terms of policy, regulation and placemaking to facilitate innovation adoption” and critically unblock barriers. Reinforcing the value of JOINER not just as a scientific instrument in its own right, but as a platform for collaboration and joint problem solving.The full resources from the launch event can be found here but it was perhaps Dominic O’Brien from University of Oxford and the hub lead for HASC who put it best: “none of us really know where this is going to go, other than somewhere interesting.”