Red.es is a public agency under the umbrella of the Department of Digital Progress in the Ministry for Economic Affairs. At the end of 2018, the agency launched a public tender for businesses to identify, develop and test out 5G technology pilot schemes to see if future investment by Spanish operators could be justified.
At the turn of 2019, the tender concluded with two projects chosen to be followed through in the Andalusia and Galicia regions, with an allotted budget of just over 35 million. More than 10 million of the budget was to be co-financed by Red.es through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the Spanish Multi-Regional Operations Programme (POPE) would supervise the two projects.
APBA would specifically be involved in Vodafone and Huaweis Joint Venture project in Andalusia that would last 30 months and be allotted a budget of over 25 million. The partnership applied for more than 6 million of the funding to be co-financed by Red.es through ERDF aid.
The project envisages thirty-two usage scenarios that would be undertaken in widely-differing areas: agriculture; health; cities and smart ecosystems; security and defence; society; digital economy and culture; digital transformation; and tourism. Among others, there would be ten cases experimenting with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in various fields, five cases experimenting with drone application, and three cases exploring facial recognition.
A 5G network was to be deployed in several locations throughout the provinces of Seville, Malaga, Cadiz, Huelva and Jaen to set up the usage scenarios: the metropolitan area of Seville (historical centre, Cartuja Island, Royal Fairground and FIBES Conference & Exhibition Centre areas) and in the village of Guadalema de Quinteros; around Malaga (the city centre, Andalusia Technology Estate, Maria Zambrano Station, Digital Content Cluster and Car Museum); in Cadiz at the Airbus factory in Puerto Real and at our port in Algeciras; at the Port of Huelva; and at Atlas Aerodrome in Jaen.
By taking part in the initiative, our aims at APBA were to try out the new technology to compare and contrast both the technological infrastructure capabilities and its capacity to provide a foundation for innovative applications in the field of port security, operations and infrastructure.
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