Technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton recently deployed a 5G test lab at a U.S. naval base that included 5G infrastructure heavyweights Ericsson and Nokia, and showed a growing comfort level of the U.S. military in taking advantage of commercial 5G network developments.

The test lab was deployed at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Virginia. It was designed to test and support the ability for sailors to use 5G technology for communications and connectivity on a ship and also from the pier to a ship.

Stephen Booher, chief systems architect for Booz Allen, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that his firm acted as the systems-integrator on the test lab. This included end-to-end design and implementation work.

Booher added that the work was around tapping into the more traditional 5G vendor ecosystem.

“It’s around how the value proposition of bringing in multiple vendors, leading vendors that are at the forefront of commercial technology, and how the DoD can take advantage of that commercial investment to meet their mission needs,” Booher said. “The focus is just proving the efficacy of the new technologies and how that might be used in the Navy and the DoD as a whole.”

Ericsson and Nokia provided equipment for the project, including their 5G core and radio systems.

Steve Vogelsang, CTO for Nokia Federal, said the goal was to use as much standard 5G equipment as possible for the deployment.

“We want to use our relatively standard equipment, the COTS [common-off-the-shelf] hardware that we provide to the big MNOs [mobile network operators] and that we’ve adapted for private wireless deployments for various use cases,” Vogelsang said.

Booher could not provide details on specific radio frequencies used for the deployment, but he did note that the goal of the deployment was to tap into equipment that was already in use to support commercial 5G services.

“The broad effort is trying not to break the commercial portfolio,” Philip Wacker, VP of business development at Ericsson, added. “So, looking at the broader ecosystem that's available, devices, chipsets, radios from Nokia, and Ericsson, but kind of staying in that type of bracket so that the DoD can focus on their missions.”

While the DoD work has a specific military use case target, Vogelsang did note that the work between Nokia and Ericsson on the project was similar to how the vendors partner with commercial operators.

“One of the beauties of 5G is that it is a standard and open technology, and that's what creates this ecosystem of devices, of use cases, of equipment,” Vogelsang said. “Ericsson and Nokia, we both participate in that and so we're aligned in helping to make that ecosystem work for the DoD. Of course, we'll compete and we'll try to get our fair share, but in the bigger mission we're aligned.”

Booher said this latest work stemmed from the DoD’s “Tranche 2” work around expanding the reach of its 5G network testing.

That effort was announced in mid-2020, and named seven U.S. military sites that would gain these new testing measures. These included Naval Base Norfolk; Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii; Joint Base San Antonio, Texas; the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California; Fort Hood, Texas; Camp Pendleton, California; and Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

The Tranche 2 work built on an initial five locations named as part of the Tranche 1 announcement in 2019. Those initial military sites included Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; Hill Air Force Base, Utah; Naval Base San Diego, California; Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Georgia; and Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

This work has also pulled in various vendors and service providers to expand the reach of 5G systems.

The DoD recently extended a contract with satellite communications system provider EchoStar to operate a 5G standalone (SA) network at the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii and at the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.

EchoStar’s Hughes Network Systems subsidiary is leading that deployment, which includes open radio access network (RAN) equipment, edge cloud and a packet processing core. They are using EchoStar’s spectrum assets; Cisco transport routers, switches and firewalls; JMA Wireless’ open RAN equipment; Intel’s edge cloud stack and Xeon processors; and site survey and network installation services from Boingo Wireless.

AT&T last year also led a technology consortium using 5G and open RAN technology to test intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities for the DoD. That test used AT&T’s private 5G network platform, Fujitsu’s open RAN, and aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman’s tactical data links to transmit data and video for the DoD-focused “digital battle network.”

Booz Allen’s Booher said his firm’s work will continue be in supporting the DoD’s “wide-scale adoption and moving to the next step of the prototyping efforts.”

“That's kind of what we're looking forward to is how all of these efforts move forward to a wide-scale adoption and really satisfying duty missions with the DoD,” Booher said. “That's what we're excited about.”