Interview: Ari Kynaslahti, head of strategy and technology at Nokia’s Mobile Networks division, is confident 5G-Advanced (5G-A) will give the vendor a much-needed financial boost, as he pointed to revenue potential across seven use cases including AI, extended reality (XR) and RedCap.
Speaking on Mobile World Live’slatest podcast, Kynaslahti said customers and partners believe 5G-A is “the true 5G”, meaning it would “absolutely” lead to an improvement in the vendor’s top-line.
Kynaslahti comments are timely, coming shortly before Nokia reported an 18 per cent drop in Q2 2024 sales mainly due to challenges in its Networks business.
However, with 3GPP completing work on Release 18 standards last month, Kynaslahti said the vendor is working heavily on 5G-A as the industry begins to transition from non-standalone 5G to standalone 5G.
He explained the vendor has picked out seven focus areas for its 5G-A push: RedCap for IoT; unmanned aerial vehicles; non-terrestrial networks; AI/ML; XR; uplink performance improvements; and energy efficiency.
Highlighting a few key use cases, Kynaslahti said using RedCap for wearables and video represented a big monetisation opportunity as Nokia could sell equipment upgrades,
On XR, he said 5G-A could lead to more adoption of eyewear powering AR and VR, rather than using goggles which are “still simply big and heavy”. He also pointed to the opportunity of using drones for air traffic control and using AI to optimise network traffic between different frequencies.
During the interview, he also spoke about how 5G-A is an important step on the road to 6G.
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