Nokia and Tencent have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly conduct R&D work to explore the potential of 5G that will benefit billions of internet users in China.
Both firms would be initiating an end-to-end 5G test environment in China's southern city of Shenzhen and will also leverage the AI and automation management capabilities enabled by 5G to promote international standards and an open-source ecosystem to expand the evolution of latest services.
Nokia and Tencent will also be conducting a 5G application research by making use of technologies like Edge Computing which would be of a great advantage to a number of markets, including entertainment, transportation, intelligent manufacturing, energy and finance.
Marc Rouanne, president of mobile networks at Nokia, said: "This collaboration with Tencent is an important step in showing webscale companies around the globe how they can leverage the end-to-end capabilities of Nokia's 5G Future X portfolio. Working with them we can deliver a network that will allow them to extend their service offer to deliver myriad applications and services with the high-reliability and availability to support ever-growing and changing customer demands."
Nokia on the other hand is continuing its focus on 5G with a series of latest updates. The Finnish firm has developed the AirFrame open edge cloud infrastructure for the 5G era to help operators effectively use their network resources and distribute workload rationally across the network. The AirFrame open edge server which Nokia designed for deployment at extant base station sites will begin its shipping during the third quarter of 2018.
