In a Monday blog post following last week’s annual Telecoms Summit in Santander, Nokia’s Senior Vice President of the Europe Market Markus Borchert set his sights on a 2020 date for the “first commercial full spec 5G roll-out.”
According to Borchert, the Finnish tech giant is seeking to maintain Europe’s position as an innovator as other companies across the globe race to be the first to launch the next generation telecom technology.
“The European mobile industry has a strong track record in innovation and developing new services but is currently lagging behind other developed markets in next-generation networks,” Borchert wrote. “A sustainable 5G ecosystem is necessary to help push Europe back to the forefront of the global mobile industry again.”
The proposed rollout would come in connection with the 2020 European soccer championship, and would allow for “massive traffic with virtually zero latency and an explosive growth of the devices” Borchert said.
Nokia has recently unveiled several of its contributions toward making the 2020 5G deadline a reality, including the launch of a 5G-ready broadband solution and a programmable 5G architecture.
The announcement comes on the heels of Verizon’s announcement last week that it plans to roll out field trials of its 5G wireless technology in the U.S. by next year. Other companies, such as Huawei, KT Telecom and NTT Docomo, have also announced 5G launch dates of 2018 (for both Huawei and KT) and 2020 for NTT Docomo.
