Verizon Business forged a collaboration with Oracle to develop use cases for various industries, which an operator executive explained was the first to employ its fixed wireless access (FWA) spectrum to deliver on premise private 4G and 5G networks.

Oracle is employing the networks at a US laboratory to allow industries including utilities, manufacturing, communications, construction and engineering to trial 4G and 5G use cases.

Verizon is employing its mmWave and C-Band spectrum to enable testing of use cases spanning connected devices, drones, AR, robotics, visualisation and AI.

Arvin Singh MD of Global 5G and Edge Innovation at Verizon Business, told Mobile World Live Oracle approached the operator two years ago about its vision for creating a 5G industry lab.

“This is really to create a working sandbox that’s for pragmatic innovations, things that we can influence and apply at commercial scale for industries within the next six to 18 months.”

“We don’t want this to be just a science project.”

Singh explained Oracle is focused on transferring customer data to its cloud and hyper-compute infrastructure. “Their focus is big about data, about the cloud aspects of it, about AI and computer vision.”

Currently, there are more than 30 partners in Oracle’s ecosystem at the lab: Verizon is using Ericsson equipment to provision the connectivity.

On premise, private networks provide lower latencies than public networks and they don’t need to send the data to a cloud and then back to a factory because all of the data is kept in a locally.