Cisco, Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, Dell, and HP have announced their successful 5G interoperability trials in partnership with mobile edge technology provider Alef Mobitech and an unnamed “tier-one global mobile carrier”.

The tests, which used the Alef edge computing platform, were completed across New Jersey, Sao Paulo, and Mumbai.

According to Alef, the tests show its platform can be “reliably deployed into national mobile networks as a seamless, transparent overlay on their existing 4G infrastructure”.

“The interoperability testing included standard billing interfaces — both pre-paid and post-paid, for voice and data services — and a comprehensive revenue assurance test regimen,” Alef said.

“Alef also demonstrated comprehensive interconnects with existing operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning systems … throughout all of this testing, zero changes to the existing infrastructure were required.”

The announcement followed Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia last week syncing their 5G equipment in partnership with SK Telecom in Korea, interoperating Samsung’s 5G Non-standalone (NSA) switchboard with Ericsson and Nokia’s 5G base stations.

In July, Huawei, Intel, and China Mobile also worked on 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT), which they said would help accelerate the commercialisation of 5G networking equipment globally.

“This was multi-vendor 5G NR IODT with full protocol, full channel, and full procedure finished, which means that 5G network and 5G terminals from different vendors can not only perform functional tests, but also can further implement 5G service tests [and] support various enhanced mobile broadband services such as ultra-high-definition video and VR,” the companies said at the time.

Intel and Huawei had in February used Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 to conduct the world’s first 5G NR over-the-air interoperability public demonstration after Huawei had announced partnering with Intel on interoperability trials based on 3GPP standards back in September 2017.

At the end of December, Ericsson kicked off 5G interoperability trials with Australian mobile carrier Telstra; United States carriers T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T; Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo; Korean carrier SK Telecom; and European carriers Vodafone and Orange, as well as smartphone chip giant Qualcomm.