The seven-year funding programme is designed to give companies and research institutions unparalleled opportunities to drive global development in new technologies and research projects. For the telecommunications industry, Horizon Europe includes a variety of focus areas such as infrastructure to support 6G technologies and artificial intelligence.
The UK’s move to become reassociated with Horizon Europe regionally highlights the importance of supporting businesses across the region with access to the best of its telecoms expertise — and vice versa.
Let’s take a closer look at what this means for 2025 and how the UK can help drive the telecommunications industry forward.
Enabling access to experts
Telecoms are a bloodline for everything that’s connected – and the UK has long understood the importance of this, with the history of telecommunications companies going as far back as the 1800s.
The country is widely known for its research and development (R&D) capabilities in the industry. Its reassociation with Horizon Europe enables access to scientists, academic researchers and field experts from the UK to support innovation for pan-European businesses.
The UK has already played a valuable role in previous Horizon-funding projects.
One example is 5G-VICTORI – large-scale, cross-vertical 5G trials across Europe that set out to show how the technology could transform services in diverse environments.
The trials were conducted by a consortium of major players from ICT, including operators, equipment vendors, academic, research organisations, SMEs, and vertical industries across Europe.
As part of the consortium, the University of Bristol was responsible for designing, integrating and deploying a fully operational network, meeting all the requirements of the 5G-VICTORI services.
From Cloud to MEC and 5G, the 5GUK testbed successfully delivered service-provisioning at all network edges – completing the 5G-VICTORI platform in the UK and incorporating all the required hardware components, networking functionality and software capability.
Boosting collaboration and partnerships
A record-breaking £63 million investment was announced at the government’s recent International Investment Summit to supercharge growth and innovation across the country.
Among some of the companies investing were the biggest names in technology – demonstrating that the UK is a destination for economic growth and technological development.
With its fortuitous position between global time zones and located just a short distance from the European continent, the UK continues to be an attractive spot for collaboration and innovation.
The country’s reassociation with Horizon Europe reopens the door to enable better and stronger partnerships to form between the regions. This not only allows firms in Europe to access and collaborate within the UK’s ecosystem but also provides access to guidance, advice and support from the leading minds in the country’s telecoms industry.
As innovation continues to evolve in the UK – with for example, Ericsson announcing a 6G research unit will be established in the country as part of a ten-year investment – the opportunities to learn and innovate in the UK will only increase.
Providing access to world-leading learning environments
With 90 world-class universities, and three in the top global ten, the UK is home to many quality institutions for students, academics and researchers alike.
As a result, the quality of academia and talent in the UK makes it an attractive offer for international telecom partners wanting to research and develop new propositions further.
The UK has already delivered award-winning work as part of Horizon Europe. Another example of the country’s contributions is 5G-Complete where the University of Bristol collaborated with the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications with its Smart Internet Lab.
The Smart Internet Lab designed and delivered the Optical Edge node for 5G as part of their participation in the EU-funded project, which ran from 2019 to 2023.
The project’s goal was to revolutionise 5G architecture. It achieved this by efficiently combining compute and storage resource functionality over a unified ultra-high capacity converged digital/analogue Fibre-Wireless (FiWi) Radio Access Network (RAN).
The European Commission’s Innovation Radar initiative recognised the Smart Internet Lab as a “key innovator” for its work on the 5G-Complete project – highlighting the valuable input the UK was able to bring to the project.
As an associated member of Horizon Europe, the UK can continue to contribute to ground-breaking, innovative telecoms solutions – helping to bring about the future of the industry’s development, through academics, collaborative partnerships, field experts and more.
Want to know more? Read our paper to learn why the UK is the definitive R&D destination.
Ian Smith is the head of UKTIN. Smith previously worked as the chief technology officer at Quickline Communications, and programme director for the 5G Testbeds and Trials programme for the UK government.