Turin, first 5G city in Italy

Telecom Italia has issued a press release stating that Turin will be the first 5G city in Italy. The press release says:

Turin will be the first Italian city and one of the first in Europe to have a new 5G mobile network. The project entered the operational stage today thanks to a Memorandum of Understanding signed by TIM and the Municipality of Turin.

By 2018 in Turin, where TIM's innovation and development centre is based, the first 5G technology trial in a metropolitan area will be launched with the aim of driving the development of a new generation mobile network, confirming the company’s commitment to mobile innovation, a role that it also plays at global level contributing to the definition of the 5G standard.

The “Turin 5G” project includes the gradual extension of the new mobile broadband infrastructure to the municipal urban area with the aim of covering the entire city by 2020.

Thanks to this memorandum, TIM plans to install, as early as 2017, more than 100 small cells in the main areas of the city, including Via Roma, Via Po, Via Garibaldi, Via Lagrange and Piazza Vittorio, in the Quadrilatero Romano, and in the areas where the Polytechnic University and University of Turin are located. These small cells will be in addition to the 200 mobile ultrabroadband sites which TIM will use to guarantee the best radio coverage in the city. The new mobile network will be supported by TIM's optic fibre infrastructure which already covers almost the entire city.

With this initiative, Turin will be nominated by TIM as the first Italian 5G city to become the preferred location for the activities envisaged in the 5G Action Plan of the European Commission, which aims to speed up development by launching trials and later public use of the new technology starting with the main metropolitan areas. Turin will therefore become part of the first pan-European network of 5G interconnected cities.

The trial will involve up to a maximum of 3,000 users who will be able to take advantage of very high performances and transmission speeds and experimental services and applications, provided by the city administration and made possible by TIM’s 5G network.

Specifically, TIM will provide the city of Turin with new generation services linked to the Smart City, such as those relating to public security, the management of public transport fleets and the provision of the information services associated with them, as well as remote surveillance solutions in extensive areas of the city, virtual reality to support tourism and, through the introduction of 5G technologies in the production processes used in the manufacturing industry, even new services to develop Industry 4.0 in the Turin area.

TIM (TIM is an Italian brand owned by Telecom Italia.) also announced back in Dec that they are among the first companies in the world on the road towards 5G, experimenting on live network, in collaboration with Altiostar, the Virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) technology which makes it possible to improve the quality of the current mobile network and increase its efficiency.

The tests conducted in the field have confirmed the maturity of the solution and the benefits expected in terms of improvement in performance and quality of the service offered. For this initiative a virtual server has been installed in Turin, more than 60 kilometres away from the Saluzzo antennas, which has demonstrated its ability to coordinate radio base station even at considerable distances, without affecting connection and performance, thanks to efficient transmission techniques based on Ethernet fronthauling.

The flexibility, the scalability and the possibility of introducing algorithms developed by third parties for the new virtualised architecture enable efficient management of  increasing mobile traffic and its rapid changes through the introduction of new SON (Self Organizing Network) functionalities such as innovative methods of automatic network configuration developed by TIM and tested on the Altiostar solution.

TIM and Ericsson partnered to launch “5G for Italy” program to accelerate Italy's digitalization last year and renewed their partnership again this year.

TIM and Kumu Networks have also tested Full Duplex (In-band Full Duplex - IBFD) last year. These tests were carried out in vicinity of Turin as well. Full Duplex, when available will double the capacity of Mobile Networks as the same frequency could be used for transmission and reception at the same time.