Samsung R&D Institute UK (SRUK) is pleased to announce participation in the REASON project, funded by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and led by University of Bristol. The REASON project is one of the successful projects from the Future Open Network Research Challenge (FONRC), a £25 million opportunity for the telecoms industry to advance UK-based research in open principles-based network research and innovation.

Samsung recently announced significant new investment in their UK Research team, based around development of 6G technologies at SRUK in Staines-Upon-Thames. The funding from DCMS will add to this growing drive towards the principles of open networking and advanced technology research, as 5G matures and the work on 6G begins. Samsung views the UK as a key market in Europe, having won business with Vodafone to deploy Open RAN.

Dan Warren, Director of Advanced Network Research at SRUK commented ‘Samsung has wanted to engage in UK government backed research for many years, and the opportunity that the REASON consortium offered was too good to pass up. We are delighted to be working with the other project partners to advance the application of AI to network technologies, and look forward to progressing the path to a larger ecosystem of vendors in the UK through the adoption of the UK Government open network principles’.

Welcoming Samsung to the project, Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou, and leader of the REASON project, said ‘It is fantastic to have Samsung working alongside us and the other partners in the REASON project. Samsung are well positioned to be a significant provider of networking equipment in the global mobile telecoms market, and so to secure their participation in our project gives it credibility, as well as being an illustration of the vendor diversity that UK Government is looking to promote’. Project REASON will start in early 2023 and run for 2 years.