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The MOU affirms our mutual commitment to drive innovation across advanced telecommunications, accelerate commercialisation of key digital technologies to address global trends and promote knowledge exchange and skills development between Taiwan and the UK.
JOINER (Joint Open Infrastructure for Networks Research) is an EPSRC-funded international scale open experimentation platform for future networks research, development and innovation. It is built around a set of national nodes in 16 leading universities across the UK and beyond designed to support large-scale experimentation in 6G, NTN, Spectrum, Security and Advanced AI, through a federated, open research infrastructure.
Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is one of the world’s leading technology R&D institutions. It focuses on innovation development in smart living, quality health, and a sustainable environment and is dedicated to incubating startups and spinoffs, as well as promoting international cooperation.
This partnership enables JOINER and ITRI to facilitate greater alignment between research and practical industry needs, helping to bridge traditional siloes between industry and academia and accelerate the process of validation via system-level experimentation and co-creation of 6G solutions and applications. The platform allows for real-life testing across UK and Taiwan, identifying complementarities and bridging skills gaps across the two nations. JOINER lead, Professor Dimitra Simeonidou OBE, FREng, FIEEE, said:
“We are thrilled to be signing this MOU and look forward to uniting the research expertise of both JOINER and ITRI, and underscore how vital global collaboration is in tackling the most pressing technological challenges of the telco sector.
“JOINER offers a unique environment for joint real-life experimentation, which drives innovation and advances commercialisation into international markets. Working with ITRI also offers huge potential for learning opportunities and will inform our approach to delivering the networks of the future.”
ITRI lead, Dr. Ting, Director General of ITRI’s Information and Communications Research Laboratories, said:
“6G is advancing along two major directions: the integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, and the convergence of communication, sensing and computing. ITRI has long been committed to research and development in non-terrestrial networks and next-generation communications and has completed validation activities with international partners including the European Space Agency (ESA), MediaTek, Airbus, Eutelsat OneWeb and Sharp, building capabilities from key components to system-level integration.
This Taiwan–UK collaboration marks a significant step from research towards international validation and ecosystem alignment. It will strengthen Taiwan’s participation in global 6G standardisation, connect with international supply chains, and accelerate industrial deployment.”