Thomas Magedanz (PhD) has been named honorary professor at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cape Town since January 2026. In addition, he has been professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, leading the chair for next generation networks (www.tu.berlin/en/av) since 2004. In addition, since 2003 he has been Director of the Business Unit Software-based Networks (NGNI) at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS (www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/ngni) in Berlin. 

For more than 35 years Prof. Magedanz has been a globally recognized ICT expert, working in the convergence field of telecommunications, Internet and information technologies, understanding both the technology domains and the international market demands. With a strong focus on international visibility and impact in both academia and the telecommunications industry he focussed on developing the key telecommunications control, management, and orchestration platforms in the evolution of 2G to 6G as pioneering open software toolkits. 

The globally well known OpenIMSCore, OpenEPC, OpenBaton, OpenMTC, Open5GCore, and Open6GCore, allowed academics, network operators and vendors around the globe to build open, modular testbed infrastructures for their own research and developments. Since the late nineties he has become a globally known mastermind, leader and innovator for prototyping emerging ETSI and 3GPP standards and the authority for building open testbeds. Besides his numerous publications and tutorials, he organized many IEEE conferences, workshops, and special issues in the last 35 years as technical co-chair. 

Prof. Magedanz has started his professional career as a PHD Student at TU Berlin in 1989, working on Intelligent Network architectures, standards and innovative service implementation options enabled by emerging software and middleware technologies for network operators. In this course he published many IEEE tutorial and research papers on Intelligent Networks and their evolution and also published the first international book on Intelligent Networks with International Thomson Computer Press in 1996. 

He has contributed tremendeously as a technical leader to the global understanding of the softwarization of telecommunication networks over the last 30 years. Thoughout these years he actively studied the impacts of innovative software paradigms on the evolution of modular telecommunication service control and management platforms for a globally emerging deregulated, open telecommuncations market.

By providing practical toolkits, like the OpenIMS Core in the rise of an internet inspired 3G vision, or the OpenEPC and OpenBaton toolkits in the dawn of virtualized 4G network, enabling the establishment of open, modular, and vendor independent testbed infrastructures at numerous research centers of universities, network operators, and vendors around the globe, he contributed tremendously to the early shaping and practical validation of emerging 3GPP and ETSI standards for the next generations of software-based mobile networks.

Today Prof. Magedanz is probably best known for his Open5GCore (www.open5gcore.org) toolkit, representing the defacto 3GPP 5G reference platform to facilitate practical 5G research and development in the future networking research community at large. In addition to public network evolution, he contributed massively to the international understanding and ecosystem development of open, modular 5G private/Campus networks with the rise of private 5G spectrum in Germany and the political movements towards OpenRAN, which is well documented in the Fraunhofer FOKUS xG Playground (www.5G-Playground.org).

His current research is targeting the 5G evolution to 6G, including Core-RAN integration (including Open RAN integration), Satellite/Non-terrestrial Networks and 5G/6G integration, as well as AI/ML based 5G/6G network control and management. In this context he is acting as principal investigator in the German BMFTR Open6GHub (https://www.open6ghub.de/en/) and BMFTR 6G-RIC (https://6g-ric.de/) flagship projects, investigating in new organic 6G networking concepts. Based on this, he started in 2024 the development of the first 6G core network toolkit (https://www.open6gcore.org/), which is nowadays supported by major tier one operators.

In 2023 he founded the international Open Research Infrastructures and Toolkits for 6G initiative (https://openrit-6g.org/), which unites the international testbed community at various IEEE, ACM and dedicated workshops. The corresponding Open6GNet (https://www.open6gnet.org/) open source initiative, which he founded also in 2023 together with UCT to support the UNSDG and IEEE “Connect the Unconnected” Vision, is enabling 5G and 6G researchers around the globe to build low cost 5G/6G testbeds for education and research to build the needed local human skills.

His nomination as honorary professor at UCT documents the long successful cooperation between UCT (the late Neco Ventura and A/Prof Joyce Mwangama) and Technische Universität Berlin and his continuous engagement to connect the UCT Department of Engineering with the international research community in the field of software-based networks. A major milestone represents the  DAAD Project Universities for Future Internet - UNIFI (www.DAAD-UNIFI.org) which linked from 2012 – 2015 UCT with TUB, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Hanoi University for Technology in Vietnam, and University de Chile to build local experts and open testbeds for emerging 4G / LTE networks. This cooperation was continued into the 5G era and the jointly founded OpenRIT-6G and Open6GNet initiatives will provide a solid foundation for a successful international cooperation in the emerging 6G era.