Under pressure to keep up with accelerating carrier deployment timelines, equipment vendor Nokia on Tuesday announced it is broadening its 5G focus areas to include a number of different mobility use cases.
Nokia said it will turn its attention to supporting enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency communications in its 5G FIRST product in addition to addressing fixed wireless. Though 5G FIRST will incorporate early 5G specifications from 3GPP’s Phase I protocol, the company noted it will also push for the faster advancement of the full 5G NR air interface standard.
“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,” Marc Rouanne, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia, commented. “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.”
As part of its enhanced 5G effort, Nokia is looking to extend the scope of its interoperability testing, and will continue its work in the chipset and radio frequency spaces to create an end-to-end solution.
The formal announcement of a shift in 5G strategy comes after Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri made comments on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week warning of the “near-term risk” of accelerate 5G timelines.
Suri noted that rather than looking to 2020 rollouts, Nokia customers are planning to accelerate 5G trials in 2018. “Meaningful deployments in the U.S. and China and potentially several other markets like Japan” will start to follow in 2019, he reported. Additionally, Suri indicated 5G will cast a wider net than originally anticipated, requiring both small cell and macro technologies in the low, mid, and high spectrum bands and other network changes.
“(This) puts increased pressure on us to accelerate our 5G roadmaps, expanding the workload on our R&D team and Mobile Networks that is already extremely focused on product integration, and new feature requests,” Suri said. “I want to be transparent that this situation does create some near-term risk as it makes the timing of certain project completions and acceptances more uncertain than is typical for us. But we have successfully worked through such issues before, and I’m confident that we will do so again. We have strong customer relationships, deep R&D capacity, and thanks to our robust balance sheet, the ability to further invest as needed.”
