COLLEGE STATION, Texas — 5G at RELLIS will go live this fall
In a few months, the Texas A&M System’s RELLIS campus will open private 5G testbeds to public and private sector organizations.
Testbeds are used for testing out electronics on how they work with 5G, from phones to autonomous vehicles, the possibilities are seemingly endless.
Chief information officer at the RELLIS campus Brad Hoover said these testbeds will be unlike any other.
“Most of the time when you have a testbed with 5G at other universities, it may be within a building or it may be just in a room,” Hoover said, “This testbed [at RELLIS] will be over a mile long of 5G continuous connectivity in phase 1, phase 2 will be a mile and a half long.”
Hoover said no matter the weather, you can do your testing at any time of the year.
Hoover said the best thing is, they have 8 state agencies and 11 universities they can utilize.
“Experts from all over the state to help with problems a sponsor may have,” Hoover said.
They will also be working with the Department of Defense, taking modern technologies that may be built for commercial aspects and applying them to defense aspects for soldiers in the field using augmented reality and virtual reality.
“Training the soldier how to respond to different instances that are happening around them, so when they do actually happen around them, they know what to do and go forward from there,” Hoover said.
5G was introduced in 2019, due to the pandemic, there hasn’t been much use of it on this large of a scale and Hoover said in the 5G world, everything goes faster, not just with cellphones, but with AR, VR and beyond.
“You can tune the 5G network for those various use-cases that you may have, it provides so much more than just bandwidth,” Hoover said.