Ljubljana, Slovenia - Telekom Slovenije, the leading Slovenian provider of the most advanced ICT solutions, and Iskratel, the leading European solution provider for the digital transformation of industries, have launched a cooperation in the development of 5G networking solutions. The aim is to deploy 4G/5G hybrid public-private networks that are of particular interest to the smart industry, also called Industry 4.0. In order to best serve the needs of their customers, the partners will first undertake an analysis of market needs, perform equipment interoperability testing and investigate the spectrum planning aspects.

Telekom Slovenije’s Member of the Management Board, responsible for technology, Matjaž Beričič, MSc, said he is pleased that Iskratel has chosen to cooperate with Telekom Slovenije on one of the key areas of 5G development, focusing on the smart factory use case and building an open ecosystem of partners that share a common vision of possibilities coming with the public/virtual/private or ‘hybrid' network model.

“5G is an evolution of the 4G network, ushering new capabilities and becoming a key factor in the digitalization of economies for this decade. 5G will deliver significantly faster, more reliable and more stable mobile data transfer, with significantly higher speeds, delivered at lower latency. These shorter delays will be very important especially for the digitalisation of the whole economy, for healthcare, industry, etc. 5G brings new opportunities for the development of innovative high value-added ICT solutions and as such it will support advanced multimedia services, secure development of the Internet of Things, digitalisation of business verticals and much more. At Telekom Slovenije, we are designing our smart 5G infrastructure in such a way that we can provide, on top of communication services, numerous virtual dedicated networks for individual business verticals, and one such project is the development with Iskratel,” said Matjaž Beričič, MSc.

Primož Kučič, the Director of B2B at Telekom Slovenije added that “Telekom Slovenije is also developing other verticals and we are open for cooperation with select partners like Iskratel, who bring the ideas, solutions and demands that can be solved by modern technology.”

Robert Kuzmič, Executive Director of Sales at Iskratel, said: “We are convinced that the best 5G solutions for smart industry require an active collaboration between telcos, vendors and customers. Every party brings specific expertise and strengths to the table.”

Sales Director of BU Core at Iskratel, Kristijan Melinc, added: “As the manufacturing industry has taken the sector lead with the largest number of IoT deployment projects in 2019, the smart factory has become a key 5G use case. Co-innovation around evolving standards and interconnectivity is a particular historical strength of Iskratel, so we indeed share the vision of evolving hybrid solutions for an IoT and AI powered world: from 4G now to 5G in the very near future and private networks seamlessly interconnected to public networks.”