The telecoms industry has been talking about it for so long that it might have surprised many to hear that the world’s very first commercial 5G standalone (5G SA) network with network slicing for Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) was finally announced on 9 September 2022.
The honor went to Telia Finland, which won the race to introduce 5G SA to its 5G FWA home broadband services. It can now begin offering a range of different broadband packages, each with defined and guaranteed service levels, which will enable it to build on its existing leadership position and deliver enhanced connectivity and capacity benefits to its customers.
When announcing the commercial availability of 5G SA for FWA, Jari Collin, CTO at Telia, commented: “We were one of the first operators in Europe to introduce a 5G standalone and core network and, with the encouraging feedback of our customers, we are now deploying this new technology commercially. 5G’s most innovative applications will be built on our 5G network, and we want to keep Finland at the forefront of its development as this technology matures.”
This exciting new service offering is based on a 5G SA Core supplied by Telia’s long-term partner Nokia, which will enable it to dynamically allocate network resources and flexibly balance traffic between FWA and mobile users.
Network slicing will not only allow Telia Finland to offer slices with differentiated levels of speed, latency and data quality, but will also enable it to deliver cutting-edge services to the home such as extended reality (XR) and cloud gaming.
Of course, the success of such offerings depends on Telia Finland’s ability to provide the network experience its customers expect, define different offers, and guarantee their performance.
And this is where Subtonomy comes in.
Subtonomy is proud to have been a partner of Telia Finland and we’ll be helping them to support the exciting new services they plan to deliver to their broadband customers.
While 5G SA for FWA offers endless possibilities for creating more niche and personalized offerings for both household and business services, this level of customization is both a challenge as well as an opportunity. Many of the most promising services are highly QoS-sensitive or require defined and guaranteed levels of latency, speed and security. All of which will have to be defined, managed and monitored.
Customers themselves will undoubtedly have preconceived expectations that services will perform better on 5G SA than on WiFi or 4G, and that services will be backed by meaningful service level agreements (SLAs), as well as world-class customer support for when things go wrong. With so many services dependent on broadband quality, many customers will expect support to not just react efficiently to their problems, but to become proactive.
But it’s not just customization and customer expectations that are challenging for 5G service assurance. The disaggregation of the network combined with cloudification means that there will be more frequent activation of new services and new network functions, and an exponential increase in upgrades to handle – each of which can affect the service quality delivered and thus the experience provided.
Visibility will become absolutely critical to success. Getting the right data in real-time will be vital to help staff quickly identify the root cause of any problems – whether that lies in the radio network, the backhaul, compute or the core itself – but there will be so much data that machine learning algorithms will become essential to push important data to human staff, so that they can triage and fix problems faster – perhaps even before the customer has become aware of them.
Subtonomy is proud to continue our successful partnership with Telia Finland, providing our Network Experience Platform with support for 5G to help it deliver against its goal of delivering a world-class 5G FWA experience combined with world-class customer support.
“Subtonomy is proud to continue our successful partnership with Telia Finland as it continues to lead the world into the 5G era. We’re excited to be working with them to ensure their world-class 5G FWA experience is backed by world-class customer support and wish them huge success with their new offering.” Fredrik Edwall, SVP Sales & Marketing at Subtonomy