
The Networked Systems Group at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics has announced that their private 5G mobile test network (Campus5G) has been opened up for anyone to try during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with free eSIM access and 5G-backed public Wi-Fi available across a big area.
People visiting the event will thus be able to get a free eSIM through their Network Trial Guest Portal, which also provides details on how to connect to the related Public Wi-Fi network (SSID: “Campus5G Guest“) at some participating venues; these Wi-Fi networks use the group’s 5G based Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) connections, provided by their network.
As Jiaxun Yang from the Networked Systems Group told ISPreview (here): “On the technical side, Campus5G is an Open-RAN based 5G testbed network with 20 cells, operating at n77 band with 60/80/100 MHz bandwidth and 4×4 MIMO. 9 cells will be used in this network trial” (further details).
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This is actually super neat – will be interesting to see if private 5G, with downloadable eSIMs ends up being easier for people to use, provide better coverage than WiFi, and cheaper to deploy long term