Together with Nokia, Sonera, the Finnish subsidiary of Telia Company announced that it will introduce commercial 5G services in Finnish capital, Helsinki in 2018. The partnership was announced at the ongoing Slush – Europe’s biggest startup event in Helsinki.
With superfast speeds, significantly lower latency and capability to support a vast amount of IoT devices, 5G will enable new customer behaviors, services and IoT applications, for example in the areas of virtual reality, connected cars and eHealth, said Sonera in a statement.
In January 2016, Telia Company entered into a similar partnership with Ericsson to let customers in Stockholm and Tallinn experience 5G services in 2018. The partners recently performed the first European field tests of 5G technology in Stockholm.
More recently, Sonera also partnered with Nokia to conduct trial using NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) technology on its commercial 4G network.
During the trial, Nokia deployed NB-IoT technology to communicate information on temperature, humidity and air pressure over Sonera's 4G network in the Helsinki. The companies also connected a roaming device over the NB-IoT network.
Valdur Laid, CEO of Sonera
We want to drive the industry change and be at the cutting edge of development. Together with Nokia we will ensure that Sonera’s customers in Finland will be able to have the best network and we will also be able to start early with our 5G partnerships to make tomorrow’s services come alive.
Tommi Uitto, Senior Vice President for Global Product Sales at Nokia Mobile Networks
Nokia has created the technology path to evolve operators smoothly towards 5G; Nokia 4.5G Pro and 4.9G technologies will deliver the dramatic improvements in speeds, capacity and latency needed to meet the demand created by myriad connected devices and people.
