Nokia opened a 5G lab at its global headquarters in Espoo, Finland, with the aim of enabling customers to experience the vendor’s portfolio of 5G equipment, software and services.
The 5G Future X Lab will enable communications service providers, enterprises and infrastructure providers to see the potential benefits of a 5G end-to-end network to better serve their customers, Nokia said.
The new facility will showcase Nokia’s 5G end-to-end capabilities including hardware, software and full network slicing. The lab will also include an “Experience Zone” where customers will see demonstrations of Nokia technologies and innovations.
In addition to serving Nokia’s 5G customers, the Espoo Lab will also provide an innovation platform for internal Nokia research, prototype development and testing.
Marcus Weldon, Nokia’s Corporate Chief Technology Officer and President of Nokia Bell Labs, said: “The Future X Lab is an extensive build-out of a 5G end-to-end network, enabling customers to explore how a dynamically reconfigurable and automated network can increase network performance in areas of latency, capacity, reliability and security while reducing total cost of ownership. This new state-of-the-art facility is an extension of our Future X Lab in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and will enable us to better serve European customers and innovate with key industrial verticals.”
The two labs are connected to demonstrate global interworking and network slicing, with the widest variety of use cases, run locally or remotely, Nokia said.
The Future X Lab in Espoo will allow visitors to see real consumer, enterprise and industrial scenarios unfold in a number of simulated and physical environments, all orchestrated on a single network managing individual network slices, the Finnish vendor added.
Nokia also said that the new facility includes a service and slicing operations center, which showcases the value of Nokia’s end-to-end portfolio through live network configurations in different industrial automation and consumer use cases, and models resulting performance and total-cost-of-ownership metrics in real time.
The lab also features an access technology-agnostic adaptive cloud-native core for decentralized network architectures, which allows operators to deploy on-demand high-bandwidth services across diverse access technologies.
The new center offers a digital value platform which will allow industries to better perceive, understand, control, and automate the physical world, creating new network-agnostic tools to enable new services and applications.
Last year, Nokia outlined its Future X network architecture for 5G, which includes products such as high-capacity 5G New Radio, core and SDN-controlled ‘Anyhaul’ transport.
According to a study from Nokia Bell Labs Consulting, a 5G end-to-end network with an integrated solution from a single prime vendor can reduce total cost of ownership by more than 20% and decrease time to market by at least 30%, compared to multi-vendor solutions.
Nokia says it has already secured 48 commercial contracts for the provision of 5G globally.
