The 5G Verticals Innovation Infrastructure initiative, or 5G-VINNI, is a conglomerate of 23 partners, including telcos such as BT, Telefónica, Altice, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, as well as academics from across Europe. The €20 million project will be coordinated by Telenor Group, the international telecom operator headquartered in Norway.

5GinFIRE kick-off meeting took place at 11-13/1/2017 in Heidelberg, Germany.

5GinFIRE main technical objective is to build and operate an Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of Experimental Facilities that not only integrates existing FIRE facilities with new vertical-specific ones but also lays down the foundations for instantiating fully softwarised architectures of vertical industries and experimenting with them. The initial instantiation of the Open5G-NFV ecosystem will be driven by the automotive vertical deployed across state-of-the-art 5G infrastructures, however, it will also be as generic as possible in order to host other verticals.