Nokia Outlines Strategy in 5G, IoT and Cloud at MWC

The 2017 Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) (MWC) in Barcelona had some news from Nokia's old segment, with a retro 3310 reboot phone that grabbed a lot of attention, but these days Nokia is a totally different company. It has licensed its name to HMD Global so it can manufacture the phones, and it has moved on to creating technologies for the connected world we live in with the infrastructure for 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as emerging applications in virtual reality and digital health with next generation communications. At the MWC, Nokia (News - Alert) outlined its strategy to deliver innovations for communication service providers with faster networks that are more agile and efficient along with expansion in software, utilities and transport markets.

As the company announced its strategy, Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri (News - Alert) said, “Nokia comes to Mobile World Congress this year with a bigger and fully end-to-end portfolio to sell, and with groundbreaking innovations to share.”

The line of products and services Nokia announced at MWC were in part driven by the assets and technologies it gained with the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) in 2016. This has increased Nokia's portfolio in the areas of global network capacity.

In addressing this capability, Suri said, “All of this is underpinned by an organization squarely focused on the execution of our strategy to lead in high-performance networks with communication service providers, expand to new verticals, build a strong standalone software business and create new business and licensing opportunities in the consumer ecosystem.”

One of the new products announced at MWC was 5G FIRST, which according to the company will be essential to connect millions of users, but also interconnect billions of things as part of the IoT, which the company calls the 'global nervous system'.

5G FIRST will help customers prepare for 5G-ready architectures that cover core, software-defined networking, cloud and more with the industry's first commercial 5G product comprised of Nokia's AirScale radio access platform. Communications service providers will be able to transition to new applications so they can benefit from the low-latency and high data rates 5G promises when it comes online in the next three plus years. Nokia is going to collaborate with Intel (News - Alert) on commercial deployments later in 2017 using the Intel 5G Modem as part of this drive.

Nokia also let the public know about the recent launch of WING, a global IoT network grid to deliver the connectivity and tools to manage assets as they move around the globe, whether they are being transported or used as transport vehicles.

Cloud Packet Core, Deepfield analytics technology, and the announcement to purchase Comptel to boost its software portfolio were also part of Nokia's announcement of what it plans in the coming year and moving forward.