The 5G edge cloud network slicing solution can be used by enterprises and industries across a wide range of use cases including retail, media, utilities, healthcare and transportation

Finnish vendor Nokia and Austrian carrier A1 Austria announced that they have successfully completed what it claims to be the industry’s first 5G edge cloud network slicing trial with Microsoft.

The European vendor noted that the deployment utilized Nokia’s 5G edge slicing solution integrated with Microsoft Azure managed edge compute on A1’s live commercial network in Vienna, Austria.

During the trial, A1 demonstrated real-time HD video streaming by transmitting live camera feeds from several mobile devices using Multicasting.io’s streaming mobile platform running on the Azure edge infrastructure. The 5G edge cloud network slicing solution can be used by enterprises and industries across a wide range of use cases including retail, media, utilities, healthcare and transportation, Nokia said.

Nokia also highlighted that its 5G edge slicing solution enables operators to take advantage of both slicing and edge cloud capabilities and provide value to their customers as network slices can be tailored to support specific customers’ use cases and different applications based on network performance, quality, traffic routing, latency, and security.

Nokia’s solution also offers a sliced mobile broadband VPN in selected business areas such as a campus or city environment. Scalable 5G edge slicing supports multiple enterprise VPN deployments using the same 4G/5G network, the vendor added.

The trial was executed with Azure, which supports enterprise private and public applications at the operator and enterprise edge. Azure managed edge compute was deployed at A1’s data center in Vienna with connectivity to the Azure region in Austria.

Marcus Grausam, CEO of A1 said: “We are excited to lead the industry with the deployment of edge cloud network slicing with Nokia and Microsoft Azure. This innovative solution enables A1 to deliver secure, reliable and high-performance enterprise VPN services integrated with edge cloud applications over our 4G/LTE and 5G networks. This collaboration opens up new business opportunities and demonstrates our commitment to delivering innovative services for our enterprise customers, as well as realizing the full potential of 5G technology.”

“This deployment with our partners, A1 and Microsoft is further demonstrating Nokia’s leadership in network slicing as well as our mission to help our customers unlock further 5G monetization opportunities. Edge cloud network slicing gives customers the best of both worlds with network slicing and edge cloud applications that enhance the enterprise customer experience,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia.

A1 commercially launched 5G services in January 2020. It is owned by Mexican telecom group America Movil and has 5.1 million mobile communications customers and 1.9 million fixed access lines.