We are proud to announce that our partners UCT and TUB, along with all the people involved, have been awarded the Best Paper Award at SATNAC 2025 for their publication “Building a Low-Cost Cloud-Native 5G Network Slicing Experimental Testbed: Open-Source Solutions, Lessons Learned and Future Directions.”

SATNAC, Africa’s leading ICT conference, is an annual gathering of researchers, industry experts, and policymakers in the field of telecommunications. The 2025 edition was held in Southern Africa from November 30 to December 3.

Their paper represents a significant step toward democratising access to advanced 5G/6G experimentation platforms, particularly for African researchers.

We are particularly pleased that, after one year of the project, this research will contribute to the DIGITAfrica blueprint implementation, advancing our mission to co-construct a framework for a pan-African Research Infrastructure (RI) in Digital Sciences.

We congratulate our partners and all contributors for their dedication, technical expertise, and collaboration. We look forward to continuing our mission to strengthen digital research infrastructure across Africa.

The full paper is published here for review.