Vodafone Business Joins NYU WIRELESS as the Research Center Expands its Work on Network Resilience

Vodafone Business has joined NYU WIRELESS, the research center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, as an industrial affiliate, in a partnership that will connect NYU’s Brooklyn and London locations with the UK’s largest mobile operator.

The partnership is being announced at the Brooklyn AI-Native 6G Summit, an annual gathering of telecom, technology, and policy leaders hosted by Nokia and NYU WIRELESS.

Mobile networks carry emergency calls, payments, and critical infrastructure, and they must keep working through storms, cable cuts, jamming and cyberattacks. Following its merger last year, VodafoneThree is investing £11 billion to build the UK’s best network, designed to meet the growing demands being placed on connectivity. The partnership with NYU WIRELESS will complement this investment, drawing on its expertise across wireless communications, cybersecurity, and AI to explore how networks can become even stronger and more resilient.

The two organizations will co-author a series of white papers on topics including spectrum, UK sovereignty, and the future of resilient communications, written for government, regulators, and industry. The work will explore how industry, academia, and policymakers can help build more resilient networks as reliance on digital connectivity continues to grow. They will also collaborate on joint research projects, drawing on NYU Tandon expertise.

NYU London, the university’s academic center in the UK, will be the partnership’s UK home. It will host events and programs that bring Vodafone Business and NYU researchers together with leaders from the UK government, industry, and academia and will support joint research as the partnership grows.

“NYU WIRELESS helped lay the groundwork for 5G. The next challenge is to keep networks running robustly and securely, even when something goes wrong,” said Juan de Pablo, Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology at NYU and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. “With NYU London as a base in the UK, we can work with VodafoneThree on both sides of the Atlantic, test innovative ideas against real conditions, and get them into use faster.”

Vodafone Business joins an affiliate group that includes Analog Devices, Apple, Ericsson, JMA Wireless, Keysight, MediaTek, Nokia, Qualcomm, Sharp, and UMC. Its membership means NYU WIRELESS can connect service providers with academic researchers and with the network vendors, device makers, chip designers, and test-equipment companies that build the technology those providers run.

“Wireless research usually gets tested in simulations and labs,” said Sundeep Rangan, Director of NYU WIRELESS and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Working with an operator that runs a national network shows us which ideas hold up under real conditions, from severe weather to deliberate jamming, and points us toward the problems that matter most to the people who depend on these networks.”

"Telecom networks are a national security asset, underpinning our economy, critical national infrastructure, public services, and defense," said Nick Gliddon, Business Director, VodafoneThree. “Their resilience is fundamental to the UK’s security and prosperity. Together with NYU WIRELESS, we’re combining world-class research with VodafoneThree’s operational experience to tackle the toughest connectivity challenges and turn new ideas into practical solutions.”

Ted Rappaport founded NYU WIRELESS in 2012, and its early millimeter-wave research helped make 5G possible. Today, under Rangan, who became director in 2025, the center’s more than 20 faculty and roughly 30 PhD students study how mobile networks can share spectrum with satellites, resist jamming and attacks, and use AI.

NYU WIRELESS’ recent federal awards include nearly $10 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to develop chips and antenna arrays for upper mid-band spectrum and nearly $4.7 million from the National Science Foundation for technology that keeps drones connected when signals weaken or are jammed. These, and other projects at NYU WIRELESS, focus directly on the resilience of next-generation networks, a key requirement for operators such as VodafoneThree.