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A group of leading technology companies has partnered with Falls Church, Va.-based contractor General Dynamics Information Technology to form an industry coalition focused on accelerating the adoption and use of 5G and edge technologies across the federal government.
The 5G and Edge Accelerator Coalition—which launched Nov. 10—includes Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Splunk and T-Mobile. The coalition will use GDIT’s Advanced Wireless Laboratory to test and develop 5G and edge computing technologies for federal agencies. GDIT said in a press release that it will focus on 5G and edge solutions in various government sectors, including “military, logistics and supply chain, healthcare, education and smart infrastructure.”
“5G is so new that everyone is coming out with a 5G product,” said Shuaib Porjosh, director of advanced wireless at GDIT Nektgov. “And what we’ve found by testing them is that not everything that’s marketed as 5G is really 5G.” So the lab really helped us sort out those other parts.”
Said Robert Smallwood, GDIT’s Vice President of Digital Modernization and Enterprise IT Nektgov that the range of companies in the coalition “enables us to better address multiple use cases” in the agency environment, which the coalition is now actively working on.
“One of our engagements was with a federal civilian agency, which has five, six or maybe even more use cases where 5G could help them in their environments — everything from predictive vehicle maintenance to the factory of the future,” said Smallwood. “So we got our team together and said, ‘What are they doing, where are their heads in terms of 5G?’ And we worked together to come up with some potential ideas that we thought would resonate with them.”
Federal agencies are already looking for ways to bolster their technology capabilities by increasing reliance on 5G services. Last month, GDIT released the results of a survey it conducted among government employees, which found that 89% of respondents “are already studying or using commercial or private 5G capabilities within their agency.”
Smallwood said the survey results underscored that the focus of federal agencies right now, from a use case perspective, is “getting bandwidth and connectivity where it’s needed.”
While most federal sectors are exploring the use of 5G capabilities, the Pentagon is taking a prominent lead in using 5G services to help support Joint Domain Command and Control—or JADC2—efforts to foster interoperability across the military services. Smallwood called this kind of improved device-to-device connectivity a “game changer” for the defense sector.
“The idea that you can ingest data from any number of devices, sensors, or equipment that’s running at the edge, do some analysis on that information, and then share that information — without having to send it all the way back to a data center or a cloud environment — it really helps provide that real-time situational awareness,” he added.
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