Nokia Deploys First 5G Edge Slicing on Live Commercial Network

Nokia announced the world’s first deployment of 5G Edge Slicing on a live commercial network with mobile operators, Cellcom and Telia. Nokia’s Edge Slicing solution allows operators to offer their enterprise customers next-generation, secure, reliable, and high-performing Virtual Private Network (VPN) services over commercial 4G and 5G networks.

Once launched, Cellcom and Telia will be able to offer new services to their customers, as well as partner with cloud application and infrastructure service providers. Nokia and Cellcom’s trial with sliced RAN-Transport-Core is taking place in Netanya, Israel, and is focused on business applications and the customer experience as well as enterprise interconnectivity over a high-speed metro network. Nokia and Telia are running a live trial in Tampere, Finland together with high-tech global engineering group, Sandvik. The trial demonstrates how next-generation 5G Edge Slicing functions can operate with different mining equipment and digital applications.

Nokia’s 5G Edge Slicing solution is an evolution of previously announced 4G/5G slicing capability. It enables operators to keep critical business data traffic local while running slice management, control, and assurance on existing central mobile data centers ensuring cost and operational efficiency. It is also scalable and the same virtualized network infrastructure can be used by several customers in the same area, for example in a business campus containing multiple companies. Based on an enterprise customer’s needs, a 5G virtual private network can be flexibly deployed in an area with a 4G/5G base station or in a campus, city, or regional area. With Nokia, CSPs can now offer their customers both on-premise 5G Private Networks or 5G Virtual Private Networks.

5G Edge Slicing combined with Adaptive Cloud Networking solution, which part of its scope is automating the edge cloud network, opens additional opportunities for service providers to create value for enterprises. The solution supports all LTE, 5G non-standalone, and 5G standalone (SA) devices, enabling mobile operators to utilize a huge device ecosystem and address a large customer base. This allows operators to utilize existing 4G/5G network assets, spectrum, and coverage for next-generation VPN services. Nokia’s network slicing solution is based on 3GPP, IETF, and TMForum standards and architecture and works in multi-vendor environments.

Nokia has also announced the launch of a new automated RAN slice management solution which allows operators to select, deploy and manage slices across multiple RAN sites based on their customers’ requirements. The new solution, which supports the management of LTE, 5G NSA and 5G SA RAN slices, consists of service quality, resource partitioning, RAN traffic isolation, and engineering as well as per slice security management functionalities. By collecting Key Performance Indicators from 4G/5G base stations operators can assure network slicing service levels to their enterprise customers. RAN slice automation has APIs to Nokia’s Digital Operations software enabling end-to-end orchestration and assurance.