Cambridgeshire County Council goes to tender for £500k AR expertise

April 5, 2024 – Cambridgeshire County Council has just lately gone to tender for a bespoke venue-specific augmented actuality (AR) expertise. The AR expertise will kind a part of the Council’s ‘CORE’ (Cambridgeshire Open RAN Ecosystem) venture, which is being funded by the Division for Science Innovation and Expertise (DSIT) and being delivered by plenty of industrial and educational companions in collaboration with Cambridgeshire County Council because the Undertaking Lead.

One in all 19 initiatives benefiting from the UK Authorities announcement of an £88 million investment in innovative open 5G connectivity solutions across the UK, the CORE venture goals to harness next-generation expertise to ship a multi-vendor 5G Open RAN impartial host platform to enhance cell capability in high-density knowledge utilization places. In response to the Council, the first objective of the CORE venture is to deploy and display the capabilities of Open RAN expertise inside a standalone 5G community in Excessive Demand Density places.

Open RAN, or Open Radio Entry Community is an idea throughout the telecommunications business geared toward creating extra open and interoperable networks, significantly throughout the Radio Entry Community (RAN) phase, together with a unified interconnection normal for white-box {hardware} and open supply software program parts from totally different distributors.

As a part of the CORE venture, the Council requires a bespoke AR expertise particular to the Cambridge Corn Exchange, the place the venture shall be delivered and deployed. The AR expertise will run over the 5G Open RAN community that’s being developed as a part of the venture and can serve a twin objective:

• To firstly take a look at the capabilities of a 5G Open RAN community using the information intensive/low latency necessities of AR expertise, and secondly;
• To display how 5G Open RAN expertise can assist progressive applied sciences to generate new alternatives for an area economic system.

Cambridgeshire County Council said that to ensure that the AR expertise to display worth to the native economic system, it’s important that it’s bespoke to the venue. As such, the expertise will must be designed, developed and deployed in collaboration with Cambridge Metropolis Council who personal and run the venue. Different necessities of the AR expertise embrace:

• A bespoke AR expertise underneath the theme of celebrating the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Cambridge Corn Trade. Deployable on the principle floor flooring of the venue by finish December 2024.
• Simply deployable and detachable expertise that may be set-up, run and eliminated inside a day. The expertise will run on dates/occasions to be agreed by Cambridge Metropolis Council that match in-between the opposite deliberate occasions on the venue.
• AR succesful {hardware} to ship the expertise.
• Integration of the AR expertise {hardware} on to the 5G community that’s being developed.
• Verbal and/or written knowledge/experiences on the efficiency of the AR expertise in several operational environments and recommendation on easy methods to make the most of the expertise to assist testing.
• Upkeep and operational assist of the AR expertise should be included in the course of the contract.

The contract is valued at GBP £499,357 excluding VAT, and lasts for a period of 12 months. The deadline for receipt of tenders is April 9, 2024 at 12:00pm GMT.

The profitable bidder will even must work with the already assigned technical companions to make sure that the AR {hardware}/expertise is efficiently built-in and deployed on the 5G community. Assist for the testing and optimisation of the community capabilities via the usage of the AR expertise will even be required.

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