Nokia kicked off Mobile World Congress with a bang a day early on Sunday with the roll out of a new commercial end-to-end 5G solution that’ll be ready to roll in the second half of this year.
According to the company, its “5G FIRST” solution incorporates Nokia’s AirScale and AirFrame technology, including AirScale massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna, Cloud Packet Core, and mobile transport. The solution also features 5G Acceleration Services to help operators design and deploy new 5G uses in multi-vendor and multi-technology environments. Additionally, 5G FIRST will leverage Intel’s architecture and recently announced 5G Modem, with commercial deployments using the latter expected later in 2017.
Nokia’s solution is based on the technical specifications laid out by Verizon’s 5G Technology Forum. Nokia indicated it – as well as Intel – is among the companies working with Verizon on commercial 5G trials in 11 U.S. cities.
“We are able to leverage our breadth of expertise to deliver a true end-to-end 5G FIRST network and services solution,” Samih Elhage, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia, commented. “Working with operators such as Verizon we can help them tailor deployments to meet their own customers’ unique demands and capitalize first on the opportunities this will bring. And we can leverage the technology to work with industries to identify new uses for 5G now under the 5G community program which will in turn open up even more opportunities for our operator customers.”
Nokia said the solution is particularly targeted at meeting demand from first-adopters of 5G technology and said lessons learned from real world deployments will be applied to the final 5G standards from 3GPP.
The company indicated the radio access network components of 5G FIRST include new Nokia massive MIMO Adaptive Antennas for the 3.5 GHz, 4.5 GHz, 28 GHz, and 39 GHz frequency bands, the AirScale System Module, and AirScale cloud RAN technology and software. Nokia said its existing AirScale and AirFrame platforms were upgraded to 5G based on specifications developed by the KT Special Interests Group (KT SIG) and Verizon 5G Technology Forum. The platforms will be adapted to 3GPP as standards develop.
“Nokia 5G FIRST features all fundamental building blocks that are necessary for a 5G deployment,” Malik Saadi, managing director and VP of Strategic Technology at ABI Research, observed. “The technology will allow operators to bulletproof their 5G strategies/implementations even before standardization has been finalized.”
Nokia said it will be conducting a number of live 5G demonstrations this week in Barcelona in Hall 3, including 5G home experience demonstrations for HD TV in collaboration with Intel, 5G event experiences to show the viability of live HD streams of sports games, and a 5G industry experience with Nokia Bell Labs using 5G to improve factory workflow.
