Nokia announced that it will be providing China Mobile with an optical transport network that will enable the operator to become 5G-ready.
China Mobile is currently building a new optical transport network that will support improved data center interconnection, consumer broadband services and 4G backhaul. Looking ahead, the new optical backbone will be a key part of the next-generation mobile services, namely 5G.
"We are very pleased to work closely with China Mobile to provide the optical technology for its most advanced networks today and in the future. We'll continue to fulfill our mission by making people's life easier as we create the technologies that connect the world,” said Yu Xiaohan, head of the China Mobile customer team at Nokia Shanghai Bell, in a press release.
Nokia described its solution as a dynamic, programmable optical network that can support virtualization and cloud technologies associated with 5G.
According to Kyle Hollasch, head of marketing for Nokia’s optical business, China is the fastest growing region in the optical market.
“As the only non-Chinese vendor with significant market share in China, Nokia is thrilled to be part of this strategic build-out for China Mobile,” Hollasch said in a statement to FierceWirelessTech.
Nokia’s aspirations in China are well known. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 in Barcelona, Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri highlighted the race to 5G, saying it’s a battle between the US and China in terms of who gets there first. Both China and the US will move fast and they will be well ahead of pretty much every other part of the world, he said.
Nokia and China Mobile used the MWC event to announce that they had signed an agreement under which the companies are jointly investigating how China Mobile can extend its service offerings for vertical markets using 5G. Their research is focused on how industries can benefit from the growth of smart cities, smart transportation and intelligent video analytics.
The companies also are jointly testing use cases using Nokia 5G Future X network architecture as well as NB-IoT and MEC, and they’re expanding an existing Car2X trial ecosystem in Wuzhen to advance the use of automated vehicles, as well as technologies that improve vehicle safety.
Nokia's Nuage Networks was chosen by China Mobile (Suzhou) Software Technical Company, a subsidiary of China Mobile, as the SDN platform for China Mobile's public and private enterprise cloud services offering. The platform is based on the Nuage Networks VSP and includes cloud implementations on virtual machines, Kubernetes (K8S) containers and OpenStack Ironic-based bare metal servers.
Last year, China Unicom said it would use the Nokia Flexi Zone portfolio to densify its network where it isn’t possible to add a macro base station due to space or cost constraints.
This article originally appeared on FierceWireless.com and can be found here