Nokia announced that it has deployed its 5G Standalone core network for Taiwanese telco Taiwan Mobile.
In a release, the Finnish vendor said that the deployment will enable the operator to provide the most advanced 5G applications for enterprises and businesses, and to strengthen its network services and performance.
The deployment includes Nokia’s voice core, cloud packet core, subscriber data management, signaling, network exposure, policy controller, cloud infrastructure, and security management for radio transport.
Nokia also noted that the new 5G Standalone core network will enable Taiwan Mobile to provide advanced 5G services such as network slicing and smart city solutions.
Tom Koh, SVP and CTO of Taiwan Mobile’s Technology Group, said: “Introducing SA to unleash the full potential of 5G beyond high-speed to further realize innovative use cases enabled by ultra-low latency and massive IoT is our strategic mission in the 5G era. We are delighted to reach this milestone with Nokia to bring the first true 5G network into Taiwan. Owning the agility of network slicing to swiftly customize the network for accommodating different use cases, Taiwan Mobile will be able to accelerate time-to-market to provide a wide variety of services for everyone and everything and to free enterprises to embrace Industry 4.0.”
“The SA technology is built from cloud architecture, infrastructure-agnostic by design, which paves a critical step to a full software agile virtualization network. It unlocks the use cases with distributed cloud for low latency service with local breakout needed. Taiwan Mobile’s true 5G network will become the innovative engine for consumers to experience as well as verticals to deploy applications without limits,” Koh added.
Susanna Patja, head of cloud and network services in Greater China for Nokia, said: “This provides Taiwan Mobile with exceptional capabilities in terms of machine-to-machine communication, extreme automation, and reliability that enables critical 5G uses for enterprises; and does so with the knowledge that this standalone network will continue to function seamlessly with non-standalone networks.”
By mi-2021, Taiwan Mobile had over 800,000 subscribers in the 5G segment and aims to increase its 5G penetration rate to 30% by the end of the year.
Taiwan Mobile had initially partnered with Nokia to launch its 5G network. The telco had acquired 60 megahertz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band and 200 megahertz of the 28 GHz frequency.
Rival operator Asia Pacific Telecom (APT) recently said it expects its 5G network to reach 90% of the nation’s population by the end of 2021.
The telco expects to have a total of 9,500 5G base stations by the end of 2021 as part of a deal to share infrastructure with Far EasTone Telecommunications.
Asia Pacific currently provides 5G services through 7,500 base stations utilizing the 3.5GHz spectrum owned by Far EasTone.
Taiwan is expected to reach a 5G penetration rate of nearly 30% by the end of this year, local new site Digitimes reported, citing industry sources.
