HTC has used its smartphone expertise to develop purpose-built devices for private wireless networks, with a focus on virtual reality. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Taiwanese company’s G Reigns subsidiary demonstrated Reign Core. The network-in-a-box solution includes a 5G core, remote radio unit and baseband, and an L3 switch, all of which can fit into a suitcase, according to Shen Ye, head of hardware at HTC.
“The hardware is not that difficult, to be honest,” said Ye. “We’re using open standards.” Ye said the Reign Core is compatible with the O-RAN Alliance’s open RAN specification.
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The software is the challenging part of the compact private 5G solution, Ye said. He explained HTC’s experience creating software for mobile devices enabled the company to optimize Reign Core for low-latency use cases like remotely controlled vehicles and virtual reality, two use cases the company demonstrated at MWC.
In Barcelona, Reign Core connected two remotely controlled race cars, a surveillance camera and four cloud-rendered virtual realities displayed on HTC’s VIVE Focus 3 headsets. Ye said a small Mi-Fi device was connected to the back of each headset via USB-C, since the device does not include a 5G chipset. The demonstration used 100-megahertz of sub-6 GHz spectrum.
The Reign Core is based on Intel x86 platforms and is compatible with off-the-shelf hardware, Ye said, adding the platform supports both bare metal and Kubernetes container management.
Partners
The MWC demo used Supermicro compact server hardware to run the HTC software. “This partnership is very meaningful,” said Supermicro’s Mory Lin, GM, IoT/embedded and edge computing, in a company video. “From the consumer product perspective, you always need to handle all different kinds of demands. Supermicro is from another side: enterprise, servers. Those two technologies combined together bring the best value.”
Ye predicted the partners will go to market together, with Supermicro creating hardware solutions for customers while HTC designs the software. One target use case is remote training, since HTC has virtual reality expertise.
Gaming is another use case; G Reigns owns an arcade called Viveland and has already deployed its Reign Core solution there.
The company is also targeting smart city tech and has created a private network proof of concept in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city.
Since edge compute will be a key element of many private wireless deployments, HTC and G Reigns have also partnered with Lumen for edge server support. In a press release, HTC said the Lumen low-latency edge platform will support performance-intensive workloads needed for use cases like enterprise training, assisted operations, and virtual collaboration.
RELATED: Lumen rolls out bare metal-as-a-service on its edge compute nodes
With its partners, HTC hopes to bring private wireless customers everything but the spectrum. Ye explained spectrum acquisition strategies vary by country, highlighting Germany as a country that makes the asset available for industry. In the U.S., Ye and his team hope to work with public carriers on private network deployments.
ABI Research recently predicted the private wireless market will be worth $109 billion by 2030, and the Mobile World Congress was marked by a flurry of activity in this space, with Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, and Qualcomm all announcing new initiatives.