Malaga becomes the national capital of 5G technology

The 5GForum is the first multidisciplinary meeting on 5G technology to be held in Spain. Presidents, directors, politicians, technicians, professors and experts from all over Spain will meet on April 25 and 26 in Malaga to discuss the advances of 5G, a unique opportunity in which they will exchange knowledge of practical applications around this technology.

The final agenda of the 5GForum was presented at a press conference yesterday, Friday 20 April, at Malaga City Hall by the Mayor of Malaga, Francisco de la Torre, the Councillor for Innovation and New Technologies, Mario Cortés, and the CEO of Medina Media, Ricardo Medina.

Organized by Medina Media and promoted by the Digital Content Pole of Malaga, the 5GForum is the first national event in which leading companies of the sector will share their experiences and present demonstrations in real time, as well as their latest advances before a public of high professional level.

Directors of important multinational companies such as the President of Nokia in Spain, Ignacio Gallego; the executive president of Axión, Jorge Alberto Jiménez; or Francisco Hortigüela, Director of Communication, Institutional Relations and Corporate Citizenship of Samsung, have chosen this innovative forum to present their positions before the 5G.

Inés Sanz, Head of Customer Engineering at Hispasat, and Óscar Pallarols, Director of Strategy and Innovation at Cellnex, are other great experts who will offer a panoramic view of this technology during the 25th and 26th of the Digital Content Pole.

Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange and Ericsson have also confirmed their participation, thus consolidating the presence and involvement of the country’s large multinationals in this first edition of the 5GForum.

On behalf of Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), RTVE’s Director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation, Pere Vila, will be in Malaga, accompanied by Adolfo Muñoz, Director of Broadcasting and Networks, and Esteban Mayoral, Head of the management unit of the Impulsa Visión innovation centre, RTVE’s start-ups accelerator.

SEAT leads the group of companies and experts in connected mobility

Anna Martínez, head of connectivity and online services at SEAT, will be the main speaker at the conference and demonstration block dedicated to the automotive industry at the 5GForum, which in 2017 reached 2.8 million units manufactured in Spain.

The Galician Automotive Technology Centre (CTAG) will give with its presence a practical dimension to connected mobility, taking to the 5GForum a connected vehicle prototype in which attendees will be able to examine its features.

The CTAG will explain in a practical way its progress in the 5GCAR consortium, a Horizon 2020 project led by Ericsson and integrated by 14 companies and knowledge centers, such as Nokia, Huawei, Orange, PSA Group, Volvo Cars, Bosch, among others.

The Spanish Association of Connected Vehicles (AEVAC) will close the block on connected vehicles by giving the social focus through its president, Aitor Fernandez, who lost sight at 14 and will tell the importance of the autonomous car for him, as it gives him the opportunity to be independent and travel.

“La Camiseta Inteligente” and other 5G European projects

The 5GForum will also address other important applications of this technology, e.g. in the healthcare field. Samur will tell us about his participation in the European project “5GTransformer” and how the 5G will save lives by reducing response time. In addition, they will present the “Smart T-shirt”.

The cross-cutting approach of this 5G congress is one of its biggest challenges and what makes it unique. That is why Artificial Intelligence will also have its space. It will be the hand of the City of Seville, which will explain its innovative and award-winning security plan to prevent incidents in the past Easter based on this technology.

But if there is one sector that will be completely transformed, it is undoubtedly tourism. This topic will be addressed in a round table discussion formed by the prestigious university school of Marbella Les Roches in the figure of its general director, Carlos Díez de la Lastra; SEGITTUR with its president, Fernando de Pablo, and the manager of Costa del Sol Tourism, Arturo Bernal.

The theme of “gaming” and the changes that will suffer this industry by the 5G will be analyzed by Juan Olivares, executive of the Indian multinational OnMobile, world leader in the sector of entertainment on mobile phones.

The most important European research projects will be exhibited by Spanish universities that are at the forefront of the 5G.

Narcís Cardona, professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, will share the progress of the 5G-XCAST project. On behalf of the University of Malaga, the vice-rector of Smart-Campus UMA, Raquel Barco, will explain the European projects that are being developed around 5G, such as the ONE5G project. The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, led by Professor José Manuel Menéndez, will present the 5G MEDIA project and talk about the remote and virtualized production of live events with 5G networks.

For his part, the Councillor for New Technologies and Dean of the Official College of Telecommunications Graduates and Technical Engineers, Mario Cortés, will take part in a round table that will deal with the topic of “smart cities”.

The Public Administrations, present at the 5GForum

The importance of this technology, pending national deployment and subject to a firm commitment on the part of the administrations within Horizon 2020, is reflected in the important institutional presence.

The Regional Minister of Employment, Business and Commerce of the Regional Government of Andalusia, Javier Carnero, will be accompanied by the Director General of Telecommunications and the Information Society of Andalusia, Manuel Ortigosa.

At a national level, the general director of Red.es, José Manuel Leceta, will be present at the inauguration of the 5GForum at the Digital Content Hub.

The Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda will also be represented at the 5GForum. Pedro Alonso, advisor of the General Secretariat for Planning and Management of the Radio Spectrum at SETSI, will present the current status of the 5G national deployment plan to be presented to the European Commission in June.

In addition, in the agenda of the 5GForum are announced videoconferences of entities such as 5GAmericas, from Rio de Janeiro, represented by José Otero, Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the CEO of the Andalusian Agency for Foreign Promotion (Extenda), Vanessa Bernad, which is in the eMerge Americas 2018 being held in Miami, one of the main technological events in the United States.

In its first edition, the 5GForum takes a transversal look, addressing its national deployment, the Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Automobiles, Big Data, Emergency Services, Telemedicine, Tourism, Gaming, etc. throughout two intense days in the Digital Content Pole. The 5GForum has managed to bring together for the first time the country’s leading experts in 5G technology for this large annual multidisciplinary meeting.