Nokia is broadening its focus into multiple areas of early 5G mobility use cases, including enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency communications, company announced yesterday. Nokia plans to push for accelerated 3GPP industry standardization while building on early customer experiences with its Nokia 5G FIRST end-to-end solution, launched in February at Mobile World Congress.

Nokia sees clear interest for 5G mobility applications already emerging from operators, notably in markets like the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, and plans to implement early 5G specifications, enhancing 5G FIRST with the 3GPP 5G Phase I protocol. This 5G NR (New Radio) air interface standard, which is due at the beginning of 2018, is designed to support a wide variety of 5G devices and services.

The company continues to evolve and expand 5G FIRST as an end-to-end solution, designed to drive broader market adoption of 5G, via both mobility and fixed applications, as well as testing multiple 5G use cases. Through 5G FIRST, Nokia is evolving its 5G strategy to drive the industry rapidly towards the adoption of standards-based commercial applications - as early as 2019.

According to Nokia, company is building on extensive field experience already gained with Nokia 5G FIRST into areas such as Use of radio propagation in higher frequencies; Massive MIMO and beamforming; Integration with existing networks versus standalone implementations; The use of small cells in 5G deployments; The importance of cloud native core and cloud RAN technologies.