PR5GZ Monthly Advisory Board-April

PR5GZ Monthly Advisory Board Meetings

April 2025

We had a great turnout for the meeting.  The majority of the conversation was related to the NTIA-NOFO 3 proposal being written by Airanaculus and Virginia Tech with 4 Puerto Rican companies as facility beneficiaries.  This proposal establishes 5G O-RAN and related capabilities in a national pilot for industry deployment of this technology. The goal of the funding is to advance facility efficiency in both energy and comms management.  O-RAN provides more competitive options for technology selection and enhanced security.  The goal of Department of Commerce is to reshore communication equipment manufacturing, increase network resilience and redundancy, and support National Security via upgrades to keep life critical manufacturing competitive. 

We identified a role for all partners in identifying emerging technologies that can evaluated for interoperability within the project timeline. We will be working to actively engage UPR-M, UPR-B, Atlantic University, Ana G Mendez, and the Polytechnic Universities. Local partners in the project include PRIDCO, The Puerto Rico Energy Forum, OcyonBio Pharma, Collins Aerospace, GIG Aerospace, SPECE Co-Working, Laser Light Communications, and Althea Networks. 

Althea Networks provided a presentation.  Key talking points included:

Althea is a payments, infrastructure finance, and settlement layer powering the emerging machine economy. In addition to the telecom micro-payments platform (powered by Althea L1 blockchain), Althea also has robust tooling that allows for investment and fractional ownership of telecom assets. To learn more about Althea, please see the Slide deck that Deborah shared on our recent call, and if you want to dive even deeper, here's a link to a google drive folder with Althea's 5 short explainer videos (each 8-12 min).

The current ask... Althea is fast-approaching a major milestone with the launch of our iFi DEX Testnet. The Althea iFi DEX uses Liquidity Fusion - combining three liquidity types in a single pool (something no other DEX offers) and will help us connect our entire infrastructure finance ecosystem - from tokenized revenue to real-world asset (RAW) investing to machine-to-machine transactions. This is something we'd love to invite the members of the PR5G Zone Advisory Board to participate in, try out, and help us refine! Here's the Twitter/X announcement. 

To join Althea's iFi DEX Testnet, anyone from the PR5G Zone Advisory community can simply SIGN UP HERE.