Some people have both a front-row seat and a behind-the-scenes view of the launch of 5G. The test and engineering tool company National Instruments is one of them.  Particularly Sarah Yost, a senior solutions marketer for 5G at National Instruments.

Not only is her team participating in developing the standards with 3GPP, they do some of the research and early testing using the standards. “I feel our voice is well represented,” in the 3GPP standards process, said Yost in an interview with RCR Wireless News.

“It helps a lot [to be so connected to the standards process]when we look at our product roadmap and develop this,” Yost added.

NI does 5G research and advanced wireless research, in general.

“Our main goal is to look at the most challenging applications in wireless research, where there is not an off-the-shelf solution that can tackle that,” Yost said. NI finds partners — they call them lead users — and works with them on co-developing systems that meet their needs and solves a problem.

For example, NI worked with Nokia over multiple years on a millimeter wave communication system using 2 GHz of bandwidth. NI and Nokia developed a new hardware platform and also co-developed a number of features which became the basis for NI’s millimeter wave 5G testing software.