Advanced Info Service (AIS), the country's biggest mobile operator by subscriber base, has collaborated with the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (Depa) to launch the country's first 5G innovation centre and laboratory located at Thailand Digital Valley in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC).
Tanapong Ittisakulchai, AIS chief enterprise business officer, said the company is working with various industries to enable and accelerate their digital transformations in order to gain competitive advantages.
"Our key objective for this year is to bring 5G benefits to large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises and public agencies. One of our initiatives is the partnership with Depa to establish the AIS 5G NEXTGen Center in the EEC," said Mr Tanapong.
"Thanks to full 5G network coverage in the EEC, the centre aims to generate business opportunities by learning, idealisation and realisation to develop 5G use cases or solutions together."
Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin, president and chief executive of Depa, said the collaboration for the first 5G innovation centre and laboratory in Chon Buri's Sri Racha district will lead to 5G innovation and use case development to strengthen competitive advantages and growth in various industries.
AIS also inaugurated the country's first 5G and MEC (multi-access edge computing) platform -- AIS 5G NEXTGen Platform -- to enable faster, more efficient and cheaper deployment of 5G applications that require low latency, fast response, local sovereignty and mission critical infrastructure.
Mr Tanapong said the platform aggregates the 5G network, network slicing capability, edge computing, leading cloud hyper-scalers, and applications together in an automated offering, making it more efficient for enterprises, government agencies, application providers, solution providers, and system integrators to deploy end-to-end 5G solutions.
Customers can discover applications from the marketplace to solve their business problems and rapidly deploy apps on the edge or cloud, he said.
"The platform will also be used as a testbed tool at the NEXTGen Center to facilitate 5G solution development by customers and solution co-creation between AIS and customers and partners," Mr Tanapong said.
He said AIS has announced more partnerships, including a collaboration with Singapore's Singtel for joint development of the 5G and MEC platform capabilities.
The partnership also intends to take domestic 5G applications in Thailand to the regional market in Asia-Pacific.
AIS signed a memorandum of understanding partnership agreement with NCS Telco+, a business transformation enabler, to jointly provide digital services to Thai businesses for their digital transformation.
AIS is also partnering with Siemens to serve industry 5G solutions.
Siemens is an innovation leader in automation and digitalisation with comprehensive industrial solutions, including industrial 5G, cybersecurity for industry, digital factory solutions, and energy management.
