The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) cited a potential breakthrough in the private 5G sector, with a Telefonica-led working group establishing a blueprint the open infrastructure group stated could make deployments cheaper.

In addition to cost, TIP stated a recent trial paves the way for greater scalability in deployments. Telefonica chaired work employing computer vision to combine private 5G with edge compute in components designed to handle specific applications including video processing and the user plane function (UPF).

TIP explained these employed the “efficiencies of a central cloud where possible”, with its 5G Private Networks working group demonstrating “a number of levers to produce” the deployment blueprint.

The system employs Symworld orchestration and cloud-native platform services from Rakuten Symphony, providing control of a Kubernetes cluster deployed “onto the bare metal” edge servers, along with placement of a mobile core UPF and computer vision application.

Other participants in the working group include Tech Mahindra and NTT Data.

TIP stated the resulting blueprint “adopts an open-source automation tool chain” covering “installation, configuration, testing and live operation” of software and infrastructure.

Services including 5G connectivity, compute, storage and routing are among those included in the blueprint. TIP noted the plan also provides guidance for public cloud-agnostic computing, automated software lifecycle management and a centralised management platform.