Islamabad: Pakistan’s first 5G innovation lab was jointly established between industry and academia at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) on Wednesday.
The goal of the Innovation Lab is to determine the utility of 5G through a socio-economic lens and launch local solutions related to health, education, mobility and business that are tailored to the local environment.
The “Innovation Lab” is a research project run by the country’s largest telecom operator Jazz and Huawei Technologies, while it will involve various departments of NUST to determine the impact and utility of 5G telecom services in Pakistani society.
It highlighted that by leveraging its high bandwidth, low latency and advanced security, the project will help researchers work on potential use cases of 5G in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality.
It will be applied to the healthcare sector, manufacturing and service industries, agriculture, security, disaster management, entertainment and public sector.
Federal Secretary for Information Technology and Telecom (MoITT), Mohsin Mushtaq laid the foundation stone of the 5G Innovation Lab and said, “This lab is our part in building an ecosystem to explore 5G-enabled use cases for IT. will play an important role in helping telecom technologies in various sectors.
The lab will help advance the implementation of use cases for the development of a co-innovation ecosystem for 5G.
The speakers highlighted that unlike 4G, the use of 5G is not limited to data and telephone but has wider implementation as a catalyst for digitization of other industries.
“There is a need to take a look at the future of communications where 5G will play an important role,” said Kaan Terziolu, CEO of VEON Group.
