Nokia said it added 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to its Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) in order to support operators that wish to offer new Internet of Things services that exploit the higher speeds and lower latency of 5G networks, as well as network slicing techniques.

The Finnish vendor claims that WING "helps operators capture early IoT market share without having to make investments in infrastructure thanks to the pay-as-you-go business model." The architecture has been upgraded to 5G and MEC to support IoT services such as AR/VR maintenance, and cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) use cases, Nokia said.

Györgyi Krisztyian, marketing manager for Nokia WING, explained that the 5G upgrade was needed because "4G won't be sufficient to address the requirements of the new use cases" in the IoT field. "More and more things will be smarter around us and millions of sensors will be deployed and interconnected – that requires bandwidth. At the same time, data transfers need to happen in real time as use cases and applications evolve. Finally, security will be even more critical with the rapid expansion of IoT everywhere," Krisztyian said.

Krisztyian added that the 5G-ready, cloud-native architecture of Nokia WING "will also be a stepping stone for network slicing in order to realize the full potential of the diverse use cases." She pointed to a WING 5G Lab in Dallas, Texas, that is now available for operators to test 5G IoT services.

Ankur Bhan, head of Nokia WING Business at Nokia, said the vendor is particularly working with operators that "have a global enterprise customer base and need to address their increasing needs for secure, low-latency IoT use cases across geographical borders."

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— Anne Morris, Contributing Editor, Light Reading