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A1 Telekom Austria — 5G Playground Carinthia

LTE 5G NSA 5G SA Edge Cloud

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5G Playground Carinthia — Background

The 5G Playground Carinthia is Austria’s premier open research and development laboratory for fifth-generation mobile communications technology, located at the Lakeside Science & Technology Park in Klagenfurt and operated by BABEG, the Carinthian Business Settlement and Investment Company.

Established as the first 5G test region in Austria, the facility brings together universities, research institutions, startups, and technology companies to explore next-generation connectivity in real-world conditions. Active research use cases span smart city applications, virtual reality, robotics, and drone swarm communications — all requiring the ultra-low latency and high throughput.

What A1 Telekom Wanted to Achieve

As Austria’s leading telecommunications and IT service provider, A1 Telekom’s vision was clear: combine a live 5G campus network with a decentralized edge cloud platform to create an environment where researchers, universities, startups, and enterprises could build and test next-generation applications under real-world network conditions.

Specifically, A1 wanted to:

  • Launch Austria’s first 5G edge cloud environment — accessible to research institutions and enterprises at the Lakeside Park

  • Deliver ultra-low latency connectivity — enabling use cases such as 360-degree VR streaming, industrial robotics, drone swarm communication, and smart city applications

  • Extend Exoscale’s public cloud platform to the edge — establishing a new decentralized edge location in Carinthia as a foundation for commercial edge cloud services

  • Build a replicable deployment model — one that could be taken to market rapidly as enterprise demand for 5G edge cloud services grew across Austria and the broader A1 Group footprint

The Challenge

Delivering on that vision required solving a set of interconnected technical and operational challenges:

  • A campus network supporting LTE and 5G: The 5G Playground needed to support LTE, 5G NSA, and 5G SA simultaneously — serving a research community with varying device capabilities and use case requirements. A unified environment required a software-defined core with the flexibility to span LTE/5G seamlessly.

  • Processing data at the campus edge: The core technical constraint was latency. Processing data at a central cloud data center was simply incompatible with the sub-5ms response times that VR streaming, robotics, and autonomous applications demand. The 5G Core had to terminate locally — at the edge.

  • Deploying all NFs on Exoscale infrastructure: A1’s commitment to data sovereignty meant the entire platform — both the HyperBlox Controller and Runtime — had to run on Exoscale’s infrastructure in Klagenfurt. No data leaving the region, full compliance with data protection requirements from day one.

  • Creating a platform that scales beyond the pilot: The 5G Playground was A1’s proof point for a commercial edge cloud offering. The deployment model needed to be replicable, operationally simple, and ready to scale to additional edge locations as enterprise demand developed across Austria and the wider A1 Group.

Solution Implemented

A1 Telekom Austria selected HyperBlox to provide the Core network for the 5G Playground Carinthia campus — deploying a fully software-defined, cloud-native 5G Core on top of Exoscale’s infrastructure at the Lakeside Science & Technology Park in Klagenfurt.

  • Multi-mode, fully containerized 5G Core: HyperBlox deployed a containerized 5G Core supporting LTE, 5G NSA, and 5G SA simultaneously — giving the research community full flexibility within a single, unified network environment. All required network functions were deployed and orchestrated on the Exoscale infrastructure.

  • Local termination for ultra-low latency: The HyperBlox Core terminated the 5G network locally at the Klagenfurt edge location — keeping data processing as close as possible to the point of generation. This local termination was the architectural decision that made sub-5ms latency achievable for real-time applications, eliminating the round-trip delay inherent in centralized cloud architectures.

  • Controller and Runtime on Exoscale: Both the HyperBlox Controller and Runtime were deployed on Exoscale’s infrastructure in Klagenfurt. The Controller provided centralized management and orchestration of the entire campus network. The Runtime provided the infrastructure-agnostic compute layer on which all network functions and edge workloads executed consistently.

  • An integrated edge cloud platform: Working alongside Exoscale — A1’s in-house cloud service provider — and Kontron, a specialist in system integration, the HyperBlox platform was integrated with Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge servers. Together, the platform gave the research community access to bandwidth around 1 Gbit/s per Radio and response times under 5ms — the combination needed to make the most demanding use cases viable.

Impact

  • Austria’s first 5G edge cloud — live and operational: The 5G Playground Carinthia became Austria’s first facility to combine a live 5G campus network with an edge cloud platform — accessible to research institutions, universities, startups, and enterprises. Within weeks of launch, the first 360-degree video was streamed live over 5G by a research team from the University of Klagenfurt, demonstrating VR use cases.

  • A thriving multi-institution research ecosystem: The private 5G network enabled multiple research teams and use cases across the Carinthian academic and business community:

    • University of Klagenfurt — live 360-degree VR streaming demonstrating immersive, low-latency video experiences
    • Carinthia University of Applied Sciences — smart city use cases spanning 4G/5G radio interface analysis and distributed applications
    • Lakeside Labs — direct communication in drone swarm environments
    • Joanneum Research — robotics and industrial automation applications

  • A regional innovation catalyst: The 5G Playground Carinthia has grown into a recognized European center for 5G innovation — attracting companies, research institutions, and investment to the Lakeside Science & Technology Park. For A1, the project delivered something equally important: a proven blueprint for taking edge cloud services to market.

  • A scalable commercial foundation: The deployment validated A1’s edge cloud model as commercially viable and replicable. Exoscale could now scale edge locations as enterprise demand grows — from manufacturers deploying industrial IoT on production lines to logistics operators requiring real-time asset tracking. The 5G Playground demonstrated that a fully software-defined, cloud-native 5G Core is operationally practical at scale.