Nokia on Monday outlined its portfolio of products and services — including newly introduced chipsets — designed to support next-generation 5G networks.
The Finnish telecom giant said its “Future X” architecture would enable a complete end-to-end network, from 5G New Radio software and antennas to small cells, backhaul and planning services.
The system is capable of delivering up to three times more data capacity per cell site and, with the help of artificial intelligence capabilities, costs about 30 percent less to operate, the company said. Officials added that it can be scaled to accommodate the demands of 5G networks.
“The Future X architecture invented by our Nokia Bell Labs research has made it possible to mix the knowledge across Nokia, between IP, optics, RF, software and innovative in-house silicon,” Marc Rouanne, the company’s mobile networks president, said in a statement. “We now expect to be able to deliver unprecedented capabilities and efficiencies that will allow our customers to transform their service offering for 5G.”
Company officials attributed the system’s “unprecedented baseband performance” to its ReefShark chipset, which was unveiled this week.
Nokia said the chips use silicon developed by company researchers to allow Massive MIMO antennas that are half the size of their conventional counterparts. They also can reduce baseband units’ power consumption by 64 percent.
Plug-in units for Nokia’s AirScale baseband module result in triple the throughput — up to 84 Gbps per module — and module chaining can support base station throughputs “of up to 6 terabits per second.”
“Its combination of power, intelligence and efficiency make it ideally suited to be at the heart of fast arriving 5G networks,” Nokia Mobile Networks CTO Henri Tervonen said in a statement.
Nokia said 30 operators are working with ReefShark chips and that field deployments would be ramped up in the third quarter of 2018.
The entire Future X architecture, meanwhile, is slated to be demonstrated at next month’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
