Nokia and Telefonica have announced an agreement to work together on the development of 5G on the operator’s existing network throughout Spain. The aim is to continue testing 4.5G, 4.5G Pro and 4.9G to deliver advances such as increased speed, capacity and improved latency where and when needed, allowing the operator to create new services to meet the increasing demands of individual subscribers and the internet of things (IoT).
In a statement the partners said they intend to use licensed and unlicensed spectrum as well as Nokia’s massive MIMO capabilities to conduct trials to increase capacity in busy city centre hot spots as well as in suburban and rural areas, above all where traditional LTE spectrum is limited. Other trials will use Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technology for the delivery of ultra-low latency communications and faster network response times.
Nokia and Telefonica will also investigate network-slicing techniques on a cloud-native core network using the operator’s cloud-based Unica virtualisation platform. This will allow Telefonica to leverage a common network infrastructure to deliver discrete services to a variety of new and existing customers.
