Nokia opened a 5G Future X Lab at its global headquarters in Espoo, Finland recently, enabling customers to experience Nokia’s full end-to-end portfolio of 5G equipment, software and services. The Lab will enable communications service providers, enterprises and infrastructure providers to learn and understand the techno-economic power of a 5G end-to-end network to better serve their customers and unleash new value.
The Lab will showcase the strength of Nokia’s 5G end-to-end capabilities with live hardware, software and full network slicing, all under seamless digital operations control. 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, as well as enable engagement with the wider research and innovation ecosystem.
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, NJ, and will enable us to better serve European customers and innovate with key industrial verticals.
“We look forward to hosting customers from around the world at either Lab to experience network slicing and learn firsthand how our 5G end-to-end network architecture will help them create new economic value.”
Nokia last year outlined its Future X network architecture for 5G, which includes products such as high-capacity 5G New Radio, core and SDN-controlled ‘Anyhaul’ transport, becoming the only 5G vendor with a truly end-to-end portfolio available globally. More than half of Nokia’s 48 commercial 5G contracts include more than radio access from the end-to-end portfolio.
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 (TCO) by more than 20 percent and decrease time to market by at least 30 percent, compared to multi-vendor solutions.
The Future X Lab in Espoo is a live end-to-end network and application lab for the 5G era where visitors can see real consumer, enterprise and industrial scenarios unfold in a myriad of simulated and physical environments, all orchestrated on a single network managing individual network slices. Visitors will be able to compare the performance of a Nokia end-to-end 5G network against existing networks, clearly demonstrating the advantages of the Future X network architecture in key performance and economic metrics such as latency, reliability, availability, security and TCO.
Highlights of the Lab include:
- Service and Slicing Operations Center: The center quantifies the value of Nokia’s end-to-end portfolio through live network configurations in different industrial automation and consumer use cases, and dynamically models resulting performance and TCO metrics in real time, revealing the clear operational and economic advantages.
- Massive Scale Access: Massive throughput and capacity are the muscles behind 5G era services, with 5G New Radio, Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) and massive Machine Type Communications complemented with fixed access solutions serving as the enabling forces behind the 4th industrial revolution.
- Universal Adaptive Core: An agile, access technology-agnostic adaptive cloud-native core for decentralized network architectures allows operators to deploy dynamic, on-demand high-bandwidth services across diverse access technologies.
- Programmable Network Operating System: Manually configured, static and closed networks have run their course. The new network operating system will create, optimize and maintain end-to-end network slices for differentiated services and TCO gains. This will evolve from rules-based solutions and move to true zero touch enabled by AI across the network.
- Digital Value Platform: This will allow industries to better perceive, understand, control, and automate the physical world, creating new network-agnostic tools to enable novel services and applications.
- Dynamic Data Security: The next industrial revolution will require a concurrent revolution in security. Multi-layer safeguards, driven by machine learning, network programmability and enhanced by ASICs customized for security will provide protection from the vulnerabilities of today and tomorrow.
The Future X Lab in Espoo is an extension of the Future X Lab opened last year at Nokia Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J. The two Labs are seamlessly connected to demonstrate true global interworking and network slicing, with the widest variety of use cases, run locally or remotely – a continent away.
Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs continue to be chief contributors to 5G technologies and its development as a standards-based technology. Nokia Bell Labs has pioneered key 5G innovations, including millimeter wave and massive MIMO, among others.
