Italian navy runs 5G SA trials on the open sea

The pilot was run with Ericsson and defence firm Leonardo, announced to coincide with the Munich Security Conference

Ericsson, the defence company Leonardo and the Italian Navy conducted a maritime connectivity test using an Ericsson 5G Standalone system. The self-contained, end-to-end 5G SA network enabled connectivity between naval units engaged in a day and night training scenario on the open sea.

The network comprised an Ericsson Ultra Compact Core and Massive MIMO RAN which was installed onboard the Italian Navy’s amphibious landing ship San Giorgio, the lead ship in the trial. Customer premises equipment (CPE), also supplied by Ericsson, was installed on board a second vessel, the Italian Navy’s Multi-Purpose Combat Ship Raimondo Montecuccoli. 

The trial sent classified and unclassified information using Leonardo’s NINE encryption solution across the network. This include full situational awareness from the Combat Management System and video streams from 12 unmanned systems processed via the AI Brain platform. 

The OPEX validated the performance, security and resilience of 5G SA for on-board connected systems, while also showing how a unified 5G network can optimise spectrum usage compared to multiple standalone communication systems operating on unlicensed and potentially overlapping, bands with the risk of interference.

Part of a bigger picture

Leonardo and Ericsson collaborated in the European Defence Fund’s (EDF) 5G Communications for Peacekeeping and Defence 2.0 (COMPAD) project and demonstrated its outcomes during the Italian Navy’s Operational Experimentation (OPEX) 2-25 in the Gulf of Taranto (see map above).

The same Italian Navy experimentation – officially called the Italian Navy open-sea Operational Experimentation (OPEX Task 2-25), within the framework of the Multi-Domain Operational Experimentation Committee – included several other ecosystem partners testing at-sea capabilities.

Ericsson also collaborated with the Italian Navy as part of 2024 NATO trials, when an end-to-end 5G SA network was installed in the Italian Naval base at Taranto.