5Geneva is funded by both the French government as part of “France 2030” and the European Union through its Next Generation EU initiative within the France Relance plan. Launched in 2021 and backed by €54 billion in funding, France 2030 is an ambitious plan to sustainably transform key sectors of the economy (energy, industry, transport, agriculture, food, digital, etc.) through innovation.
Lasting 36 months, the 5Geneva project aims to:
• Develop platforms for experimenting 5G use cases at the network Edge for business players (verticals) and telecom operators. Such platforms use on-site network equipment: pCPE (physical Customer Premise Equipment), uCPE (universal CPE),
• Engineer applications as containers or Virtual Machines (VMs);
• Provide open experiments to external companies to test the benefits of 5G using multiple configurations, including 5G private networks.
As part of the France Relance plan, Ekinops was already granted €3.6 million in funding from the French government to promote the development of its New Generation electronic equipment for optical networks (NGOpt) project, focused on high-speed optical transport solutions.
5Geneva continues this approach by combining Ekinops’ specialization in the development of on-site equipment with Orange’s expertise in 5G, virtualization and integration. The goal is to deploy new solutions based on containerization and virtualized functions to facilitate the rollout of services at company premises. The project also seeks to enable on-demand local deployment of business services by leveraging Edge Computing and 5G infrastructure.
The project opens up many possibilities for enhanced business solutions that not only deliver data security, but also resource availability, customized service quality and agile deployment.
Vincent Munière, Chief Technical Officer and VP R&D at Ekinops commented:
“Thanks to this funding, we will accelerate implementation of large-scale innovation projects, with a focus on 5G and Edge Computing. This project confirms our ambitions for the Edge industry as well as our active efforts to optimize digital network performance.”