The contract with Net4Mobility – the JV between Swedish mobile operators Tele2 and Telenor and is also Sweden’s largest RAN network – will pave the way for 99.9% of Sweden's population to access 5G services by 2023.
The five-year deal, will see Nokia rollout commercial 5G services in major locations across the country, replacing the incumbent vendor’s 4G network and adding new sites annually.
For this, Nokia will deploy its AirScale portfolio, improving legacy 4G performance while increasing capacity with 5G services introduced at the majority of sites within awarded areas. Net4Mobility will also take advantage of the 3.5 GHz spectrum band for dense urban coverage.
Jonas Edén, CTO of Telenor Sweden, said: “We continue to expand our 5G offer to our subscribers in Sweden. 5G is already available in our biggest cities and we aim to offer the service to 99.9% of Sweden’s population by the end of 2023. We are delighted to extend our partnership with Nokia and have them as one of our vendors going into the 5G era with an emphasis on quality and innovation.”
Yogesh Malik, CTIO of Tele2, commented: “I am very pleased that we can now begin the broad rollout of 5G in Sweden. The new generation network will mean a significant improvement for consumers and enable innovation, automation and higher efficiency for companies.”
Meanwhile in the Philippines, PLDT and its wireless unit Smart are to begin using Nokia's Digital Operations software, cloud infrastructure software and AirFrame servers to enhance their nationwide network. The implementation will also standardise PLDT and Smart’s virtualisation environment for multi-vendor applications.
The deployment is already underway and is expected to reduce operating costs and time to market for new consumer and enterprise services.
Nokia will also standardize PLDT and Smart’s Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) across the South Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao regions of the Philippines, as the unified NFVI for the deployment of multiple vendors’ Virtualized Network Functions. Nokia will deploy applications, operations and network management solutions across its NFVI cloud platform and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core.
Mario G. Tamayo, head of technology at PLDT and Smart, said: “Our deployment of Nokia’s software and infrastructure solutions have allowed us to tap into new levels of agility, flexibility and efficiency as we add innovative new offerings to complement our current market-leading consumer and enterprise services. This is an essential part of our broad and all-encompassing effort to keep the integrated PLDT and Smart network optimized and able to deliver the best experience to all our customers.”
The Digital Operations software will automate the round-trip lifecycle management of network functions, as well as network-facing and customer-facing services. Specifically, as PLDT and Smart evolve their integrated network from physical to virtual form, the solution will manage two interrelated flows.
First, it will oversee the network function lifecycle from onboarding through runtime to decommissioning. Then, it will facilitate the lifecycle from design to deployment and assurance that orchestrates services and network slices across the network.
This will enable PLDT and Smart to drive efficiencies into their operations processes while also becoming more agile to deliver innovative market-facing services.
