China Unicom, which is already using Nokia’s equipment for the 4G technology, will now be expanding the partnership for the new 5G technology as well. The Finland-based Nokia has announced that the telecom network has awarded approximately 10 percent share of the company’s 5G core network.
For those who are unaware, the core network performs a variety of functions, including setting up connections, bandwidth management, scaling and securing the network, and now with 5G, opening up the network to support new, software-enabled use cases such as network slicing.
The Nokia Cloud core products selected by China Unicom provides Unified Data Management, Session Management, and User Plane functions, which are complemented by Data Refinery and NetAct, all deployed on Nokia’s CloudBand.
The company says that the deal also includes products from Nokia’s Cloud Packet Core portfolio, including the Nokia Cloud Mobile Gateway. It provides the 5G standalone Session Management Function and User Plane Function, in addition to supporting the 4G Serving Gateway and the Packet Data Network Gateway in China Unicom’s network.
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Nokia currently has a 17 percent market share in China Unicom’s rapidly expanding VoLTE network, where it has deployed Nokia’s cloud-based vIMS platform. This deal is expected to further enhance the partnership between China Unicom and Nokia.
China Unicom has already deployed around 130,000 5G base stations across China, in which around 115,000 were built in partnership with China Telecom. As per the company, its 5G base stations would reach 300,000 by the end of this year.
Wang Xiaochu, CEO of China Unicom, says that the growth of 5G could accelerate in the second half of this year after the deployment slowed down and impacted business development in the first half because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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