Nokia to drive 5G adoption

To meet the ever-growing interest in 5G, Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is broadening its focus to multiple areas of early 5G mobility use cases. This includes enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable low-latency communications.

Nokia will be pushing for accelerated 3GPP industry standardisation and building on early customer experiences with its Nokia 5G FIRST end-to-end solution, which was launched in February at Mobile World Congress.

China, Japan, the US, and South Korea are showing particular interest in 5G mobility applications, and Nokia will implement early 5G specifications, enhancing 5G FIRST with the 3GPP 5G Phase I protocol. This 5G NR (New Radio) air interface standard, due for launch in early 2018, is designed to support a wide variety of 5G devices and services.

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The company plans to use its forward-thinking implementation of 5G to be at the forefront of its evolution and expansion, driving the broader market adoption of 5G via both mobility and fixed applications. Nokia is building on extensive field expertise already gained with Nokia 5G FIRST, which has generated prized insights into areas such as:

• Use of radio propagation in higher frequencies
• Massive MIMO and beamforming
• Integration with existing networks versus standalone implementations
• The use of small cells in 5G deployments
• The importance of cloud native core and cloud RAN technologies

Marc Rouanne, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia said: "There should be no doubt about the huge potential of 5G. Through 5G FIRST, Nokia is evolving its 5G strategy to drive the industry rapidly towards the adoption of standards-based commercial applications - as early as 2019. Doing so will require broad cross-industry support, and we call upon regulators and governments to free up and enable the use of spectrum at low-, mid- and high-frequency bands for trials.

“This will allow robust evaluation of 5G to take place, so that collectively, we can deliver one of the most important new technologies in history, one that will truly drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution."