Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is opening a 5G lab in Fort Collins, Colorado, to integrate third-party vendors’ network functions with the HPE 5G Core Stack. The software stack for the 5G core, which includes 5G network functions from HPE and other vendors, is slated to be commercially available later this year. 

The lab, which is fully operational and available to the company’s partners and customers via remote access, has early support from Affirmed Networks, Casa Systems, Intel, Openet, Metaswitch, and Red Hat.

“Governments and telecoms operators around the world are looking to open 5G technologies as an opportunity to move away from a number of vendors which have raised fundamental concerns around security, resilience, and market diversification,” Phil Mottram, VP and GM of communications at HPE, said in a statement. “However, despite multiple successful deployments, doubts still persist about the ability of open 5G technologies to truly replace the old way of building networks,” he said, adding that HPE hopes to remove those doubts through collaborative work at its lab.

The lab also allows for testing and validation of the HPE Edge Orchestrator, which was announced last month, and the HPE Resource Aggregator for Open Distributed Infrastructure Management. The former is designed to allow network operators to maintain more control over edge deployments and the applications running at the edge, and the latter is framed as a simpler management tool for 5G compute infrastructure across thousands of sites. 

The initial focus of the lab will be to “bring innovation to the previously monolithic cellular network core,” including the delivery of improved management, data sharing, and network slicing. The vendor hopes the lab encourages more network operators, equipment suppliers, and software providers to embrace the more open framework of 5G. 

HPE has designed a “real cloud-native 5G core, so no cloud washing as many of the other traditional equipment providers are offering today,” Domenico Convertino, VP of product management communications at HPE, said during an interview with SDxCentral earlier this year.

“It’s real cloud-native stuff that has been written from scratch, dedicated to the 5G network functions,” and represents a significant point of differentiation with Ericsson, Nokia, and Cisco, which are “pretty much forcing customers to buy everything from them or nothing,” Convertino said at the time. 

HPE claims more than 300 telecommunications customers in 160 countries, and 700 million mobile subscribers across 82 network operators use HPE’s mobile core software.