Displaying items by tag: 5G FIRST

To meet growing customer interest in 5G, Nokia is broadening its focus into multiple areas of early 5G mobility use cases, including enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency communications. Nokia will push for accelerated 3GPP industry standardization while building on early customer experiences with its Nokia 5G FIRST end-to-end solution, launched in February at Mobile World Congress.

With clear interest for 5G mobility applications already emerging from operators, notably in markets like the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, Nokia will implement early 5G specifications, enhancing 5G FIRST with the 3GPP 5G Phase I protocol. This 5G NR (New Radio) air interface standard, which is due at the beginning of 2018, is designed to support a wide variety of 5G devices and services.

"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,” said Marc Rouanne, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia.

“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,” Rouanne added.

Nokia will continue to evolve and expand 5G FIRST as an end-to-end solution, designed to drive broader market adoption of 5G, via mobility and fixed applications, as well as testing multiple 5G use cases.

The company is building on extensive field experience already gained with Nokia 5G FIRST, which has generated valuable 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; and the importance of cloud native core and cloud RAN technologies.

These and many other of the key elements of 3GPP-based 5G implementation will enable Nokia to extend the scope of interoperability testing with a variety of devices. Nokia will also continue its application of leading-edge technologies, such as chipset and radio frequency innovations, in its end-to-end 5G strategy.  

Nokia is working with Japan’s NTT DOCOMO to test applications using a 5G base station and the Intel® 5G Mobile Trial Platform end-user device. This demonstrates the potential of Nokia 5G FIRST to deliver enhanced broadband at vastly greater scale. A showcase at the 5G Tokyo Bay Summit 2017 will signal the start of 5G trials in the Tokyo area.

Nokia will develop the 5G ecosystem with leading Japanese operator NTT DOCOMO, INC. in Japan to prepare for the upcoming introduction of the next generation wireless network. The collaboration - which uses the Intel® 5G Mobile Trial Platform - will commence with the key interoperability testing of multi-vendor technology using the 4.5GHz frequency band.

"This trial is an important milestone for the development of 5G in Japan, which will be one of the first countries in the world to adopt the technology,” said Jae Won, head of Nokia Japan. “Furthermore, the initiative is an important step forward in our collaboration with NTT DOCOMO, as well as other key technology partners, as we develop a technology that will meet the ever-growing demands of huge numbers of people living in megacities."

5G will deliver high speeds and low latency in support of a new generation of broadband applications, meeting new requirements for connecting people and devices, especially in megacities such as Tokyo. Nokia will conduct trials of 5G technology with DOCOMO in the Tokyo metropolitan area throughout 2017, with particular focus on busy tourist, shopping and business locations as well as at key public events hosted by the operator.

"This is a vital first step to allow us to ensure that we have the 5G network infrastructure available for when we commercially introduce the technology, with an ecosystem of device vendors to offer our subscribers the best possible choice and highest quality,” said Seizo Onoe, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Board of Directors of NTT DOCOMO.

The tests will use the Nokia 5G FIRST solution, incorporating the Nokia AirScale base station transmitting over a 5G radio interface to the Intel® 5G Mobile Trial Platform. The companies will test end-to-end applications over the air between the base station and the device on the 4.5GHz frequency band, which is one of the candidate bands for 5G in Japan. The Nokia 5G FIRST solution is based on early-adopters radio specifications that define a common interface to allow equipment from multiple vendors to connect over a 5G radio network.

"Intel believes key collaborations such as this one driving ecosystem partner trials and early deployments are critical to building successful 5G technologies and accelerating the vast benefits they will bring to users,” said Asha Keddy, vice president and general manager of Next Generation and Standards in the Communication and Devices Group at Intel. “We are excited to be part of this interoperability testing in Japan using the 4.5GHz radio spectrum as part of the 5G end-to-end solution."

 Nokia is working with industry leaders around the globe to deliver a 5G infrastructure that will meet the massive broadband needs of a variety of industries and applications. 

Industry expectations are that the first set of 3GPP 5G standards will be finalized in time for first full-blown commercial 5G networks by 2020, says Aji Ed, head of Technology, MEA, Nokia, speaking to Telecom Review. Nokia offers the industry’s first end-to-end 5G solution based on pre-standards and this is called 5G FIRST. Aji highlights the use cases for Nokia’s 5G FIRST and how it can bring them closer to 5G commercialization.

Nokia recently launched 5G FIRST. What’s the uniqueness of this and how is it an end-to-end solution?

Let’s take a snapshot of how the industry is working together on 5G and then we can move on to understand Nokia’s 5G FIRST.

We are pushing 5G to follow a set of universal standards. It means with the universal standards, devices will work with every network, and operators can use the same suite of solutions in every market across the world. Those standards are being developed by 3GPP, and the industry expectations are that the first set of those standards will be finalized in time for first full-blown commercial 5G networks by 2020.

2020 is still further away. Our most ambitious CSP customers can already see early use cases that could be delivered against the industry specifications like 5GTF or KT SIG in 2017. Additional functions like enhanced mobile broadband and sliceable core network will be part of the first 3GPP standards to be published in 2018. So, the first commercial 5G networks will be launched by 2020, whereas first adopters will deploy 3GPP compliant trial networks already by end of 2018.

One other important asset for 5G networks is spectrum. High bandwidth services are spectrum-hungry, and 5G opens the door for using higher frequencies such as cmWave and mmWave that simply cannot be used by LTE. In the US and Korea, the early adopter markets, 28 and 39 GHz are already licensed for early trials. High frequencies and the available bandwidth provide the ability to offer hyper-local services but they only have a very short range. Wide area coverage and in-building penetration needs lower frequencies to be opened up, which will come later.

Nokia offers industry’s first end-to-end 5G solution based on pre-standards and this is called 5G FIRST. This includes:

Radio:

1. 5G Massive MIMO radio
2. AirScale baseband upgraded to 5G and AirScale cloud RAN, with 5G software to run 5GTF/KT SIG for 5G FIRST and 3GPP standards as they are being finalized

Core:

1. Cloud packet core with features to support 5G Next Generation Core

Transport:

1. 5G-ready microwave transport, fiber optics for the 5G era, and IP Backhaul

What can operators do with 5G FIRST and how does it help them bring 5G closer to commercialization? Can you describe some use cases?

5G is not just another G more than 4G. It’s much more than that. Our society has been through a series of industrial revolutions, each making fundamental changes to the way we live. The 5G era will be based on cloud and digitalization, bring augmented and virtual reality into mainstream use, enable billions of sensors not just connected but feeding and fed by artificial intelligence, and enable smarter factories and processes.

5G is more than radio. It includes new radio, for sure. But to deliver the massive capacity, to keep offering higher and higher speeds we know we need to re-think the way entire networks are built.

5G will be built first in ‘islands’, hyper-local capacity that meets the needs of very specific use cases, without even needing mobility. Coverage aspect comes next to allow hyper-mobility within extended islands. We can already see many opportunities for 5G.

1. Operators could provide 5G hotspots for very high bandwidth needs, such as for streaming virtual reality content. HD virtual reality streams already need several gigabits per second – and when we move to 4K or 8K, that increases exponentially.
2. Operators could provide islands of coverage within public transport modes such as ships and trains for in-vehicle infotainment – or even on a station platform.
3. It could be used to stream data from a drone.
4. It could be used between trucks, so that they can form a ‘platoon’ – several trucks in a very close convoy where the lead truck can communicate in real time with all the trucks behind it simultaneously.

All of these use cases let operators face the investment to 5G step-wise – build islands of coverage, grow demand for initial use cases, monetize, invest in extending coverage which opens the door for further use case and so on.

When will initial deployments of 5G FIRST begin? Can you reveal some of your plans for the solution and what partners Nokia are working with?

The first use cases of 5G will be based on ultra-broadband around the world. The initial deployments of 5G FIRST are expected in 2017 and early 2018. This will start mainly in the US and Korea; however, we expect to have the 5G field trials in the Middle East in 2018. Nokia is working with the leading operators in the Middle East on 5G. We recently signed 5G MoUs with STC and Zain Saudi Arabia to collaborate further on 5G trials and deployments in the region, in addition to the 5G MoU signed with du UAE earlier. The first commercial deployments of 5G in the Middle East are expected to be around major events like Expo 2020 in the UAE and world cup event in Doha in 2022.

What work is Nokia doing as part of the ecosystem?

The Nokia way for the 5G marathon is: “If you want to go fast, go alone but if you need to go far, go together.” Ultimately, the creation of a successful 5G standard requires the best ideas to be adopted, no matter where they come from. And requirements from outside the telecom industry are very important to consider.

Nokia has established a broad range of innovation partnerships to find a common direction through collaboration in requirement setting, technology research and finally in standardization; therefore, we are driving collaborative research with leading customers, governmental bodies, regulatory and industry bodies (e.g. NGMN and 4G Americas), industry and scientific community, 5G labs (e.g. 5G Lab at TU Dresden and 5G Test Network Finland) and universities (e.g. New York University for channel measurements and characterization, and University of Kaiserslautern for 5G architecture).

Nokia is the consortia leader of the 5G NORMA and FANTASTIC 5G research projects inside the 5G PPP, which will deliver input, for example, for the 5G air interface and network architecture work in 3GPP.