What is claimed to be Thailand’s first 5G open RAN smart city is on the way, courtesy of the country’s National Telecom Public Company Limited (NT) , 5GCT, a local partner specialized in delivering end-to-end 5G smart cities, networking company Cisco Systems (Thailand), and end-to-end, cloud-native network software provider Mavenir.
In March this year it was officially announced that the Eastern Economic Corridor (EECO), a special economic zone of three provinces in eastern Thailand, had partnered with state-owned National Telecommunications (NT) to launch the country’s first 5G pilot. Under the plan, the district of Ban Chang, Rayong, will become Thailand’s first progressive smart city.
Ban Chang is connected to a motorway linking Thailand’s two largest cities, Pattaya and Bangkok. The location is close to U-Tapao International Airport, Map Ta Phut Industrial Zone and the new master planned Ban Chang Smart City.
Mavenir says its role involved providing a cloud-native, open architecture-based private network solution, a software-based platform that enabled the transformation of the mobile communication private network into a completely virtualized environment, where devices, applications, and services run on an automated network using open architecture, containers, and artificial intelligence.
The Ban Chang Smart City 5G Private Network operates on millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum and Mavenir says that its end-to-end 5G Open RAN, mmWave radios and 5G Core with Open API technology standards, in-sync with the cloud-native solutions supporting private on-premise applications deliver smart city concepts such as real-time diagnostics of traffic, public safety digital signage and sensitive environmental conditions.
Cisco provided switching hardware and application services to enable the ‘smart’ components of the 5G solution.
