While 5G standards are in the process of getting finalized, Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications giant, and one of China’s leading providers of Internet services, Tencent Holdings signed a cooperation agreement to carry out joint research and development to “explore the potential of 5G for the provision of new applications”, including different vertical markets. The agreement was formalized when the two firms signed a Strategic Framework Agreement at the 2018 Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai that took place at the end of June. “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,” said Marc Rouanne, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia. “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.” Talking about the agreement, Zeng Yu, VP at Tencent, said: “We are pleased to collaborate with Nokia to leverage the technologies, products and expertise of both our companies to fulfill the growing demands of a digital economy driven by 5G. Tencent and Nokia are fully committed to delivering richer, more diverse, multi-level services and applications for enterprises, and individual customers. Furthermore, we will support each other in creating more financial and social benefits in our respective fields, to pursue success in the new era of digital economy.” The two firms are looking to explore 5G’s potential in transportation, finance, energy, intelligent manufacturing and entertainment. Under the terms, Nokia and Tencent will create an end-to-end 5G test environment in Shenzhen. According to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the companies, Nokia and Tencent will establish a joint laboratory equipped with leading 5G technologies, products and solutions, centralized and decentralized split architecture that uses Nokia Airscale Radio Access Network, 5G Core, MEC framework and other third-party devices. Signing of this agreement gives Nokia advantages in 5G over its competitors, while Tencent, which has 1.04 billion combined monthly active users on its WeChat and QQ social media platforms, aims to capitalize on the connectivity, increased speeds, capacity and reliability that 5G services will bring by lowering the latency on the networks. Going forward, the two companies would leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and automation enabled by 5G to promote international standards and open up the extensive use of Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) and improve the delivery of online services such as cloud-based gaming and entertainment.
