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SONIC Labs

The Programme

Supporting vendors accelerate technology development and early stage integration work, with targeted innovation and acceleration activities

Collaborate. Test. Innovate.

SONIC Labs is a commercially-neutral, collaborative, environment for testing interoperability and integration of open, disaggregated and software-centric network solutions and multi-vendor architectures.

We enable and encourage innovative vendors to participate in the UK telecoms sector and facilitate a more rapid path towards deployment in UK networks, by taking early stage standalone products, integrating, and testing the end-to-end system in our groundbreaking testing facilities.

Through rigorous testing and measurement capabilities, SONIC Labs is contributing to the broader ecosystem by creating a path toward a more diverse and competitive supply base.

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Collaboration

A place for collaborative, peer-assisted, integration and interoperability testing of products and solutions at a pre-commercial development stage, addressing the challenges of multi-vendor end-to-end solutions.

Find out more about how your company can get involved through our programmes, as a PlugFest participants or a potential client user.

Contact us

Test

We provide a commercially-neutral, multi-tenancy open network testbed providing real world indoor and outdoor scale environments, including test and measurement capabilities.

This is coupled with our team of technical experts who are on hand at every step of the testing process.

Explore our lab and testing sites
SONIC Labs
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Innovate

We support vendors in growing their understanding of the UK Open RAN ecosystem, boosting their networking capabilities with potential customers, identifying how to penetrate the market with their Open RAN product and expanding their knowledge base.

Through a comprehensive series of events, hands-on workshops and webinars, SONIC Labs provides a dynamic space to collaborate, share expertise and learnings, encourage dialogue, explore new market opportunities and develop best practices for Open RAN deployment.

Read more about our Market Readiness Events

The benefits of SONIC Labs

By accelerating technology development, SONIC Labs supports individual Open RAN companies to grow and reach new markets, in addition to driving positive change across the UK and global telecoms ecosystem.

Enable and encourage innovative suppliers of 5G Open RAN products to participate in the UK telecoms ecosystem

Facilitate interoperability testing and collaboration across supplier products that may not otherwise have been tested for interoperability

Evaluate critical and longer-term advanced open and interoperable technologies, in mobile, fixed and media networks

Build telecoms skills and expertise in the UK

Provide UK mobile network operators with a pipeline of innovative and competitive suppliers and product, leading to potential cost reductions

Examine the reality of Open RAN and successive relevant technologies to facilitate open interoperability in mobile networks

Encourage growth and investment in the UK telecom sector

Support international companies to participate in the UK Open RAN market

Drive international growth through collaboration with other international Open RAN facilities

Our partners

SONIC Labs is a joint programme between ourselves and Ofcom, funded by DSIT as part of its 5G Diversification Strategy, to foster emergence of new solution providers in the telecom supply chain in the UK.

We are also proud to be members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and O-RAN Alliance, in addition to being a European PlugFest Lab host.

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