Ericsson has announced new collaborations with universities King’s College London and Technische Universit t Dresden (TU Dresden). The collective efforts will focus on 5G research, addressing both the technical implications and the societal challenges of implementing the next generation of communications technology.

The collaborations with the two universities will build on other leading European research institute and university collaborations in the 5G sphere, such as those with the Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University in Sweden.

Valter D’Avino, Ericsson Head of Region Western and Central Europe, says:

“The collaboration with King’s College London and TU Dresden will accelerate the momentum around smart sustainable cities, the Internet of Things and evolved industries powered by 5G in UK and Germany. They underscore Ericsson’s ongoing commitment to innovate in Europe and develop 5G with relevant partners as the basis of a networked society and of digitized economies in the next decades.”

Ericsson is also leading the EU project METIS (Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society) and been a driving force of 5G PPP (5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership), in which vendors, operators and players from industries such as the automotive, utilities and automation sectors are working closely together.

5G is expected to begin its commercial rollout in 2020, by which time Ericsson believes that there will be up to 50 billion connected devices in the world, mainly in machine-to-machine communication.