Nokia and the Chinese tech giant, Tencent, have announced that they will be working together to carry out joint research and development to “explore the potential of 5G for the provision of new applications”. The agreement was formalised when the two firms signed a Strategic Framework Agreement at Mobile World Congress Shanghai which took place at the end of June.
Zeng Yu, VP at Tencent, said about the agreement:
“We are pleased to collaborate with Nokia to leverage the technologies, products and expertise of both our companies to fufill 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.”
In order to explore new 5G applications, the two firms plan to establish a joint lab which will be equipped with leading 5G technologies by utilising Nokia’s Airscale Radio Access Network, 5G Core, MEC framework, and other third-party devices.
With this agreement, Nokia, as a major player in the cellular hardware market, will get advantages in 5G over its competitors, and Tencent plans to use the end-to-end 5G test environment in Shenzhen to bolster is 1.04 billion user-strong WeChat and QQ social networks. This will result in increased speeds, capacity, and reliability while lowering the latency on the networks.
While the two firms will no doubt benefit in various ways, third parties should benefit too as the firms said they’ll promote international standards and an open source ecosystem to expand the development of new services.
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.”
Aside from bolstering social networks, the two tech giants will also use 5G and edge computing to benefit markets such as transportation, finance, energy, intelligent manufacturing, and entertainment. The research could open up the widespread use of Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) and enhance the delivery of online services such as cloud-based gaming and entertainment.
Last week, rumour had it that Google is developing a streaming-oriented console called Yeti. Right now, most networks aren't up to scratch to deliver streamed games, do you think 5G will make game streaming viable? Let us know in the comments.
Image from AFP via Craig the Computer Geek
