By: By Tim Boyd, & Jean Lawrence, Nokia

What real-world innovations are truly possible with 5G? How can we monetize network slicing, generate value beyond connectivity, and show a return on our 5G investments? These are the questions our industry has been grappling with and we anticipate will be top of mind as we head into Digital Transformation World (DTW) 2022.

Back in 1981, Telia was in the news as co-creator of 1G. Today, Telia, in partnership with Nokia, is on the path to addressing the 5G monetization challenge and providing our customers with transformative services.  At Telia, we take pride in being technology pioneers, with our impact on the digitalization of the Nordic and Baltic region since our beginnings in 1853. Today we are the telecommunications leader in the region, the leading Nordic media house, and the leader in ICT in both Finland and the Baltics.

In 2021 we launched our new purpose; to Re-invent better connected living.  This sees us embark on a customer experience focused transformation journey.  Already we see significant progress. We made news earlier this year when Telia deployed the world’s first 5G edge slicing solution on a live commercial network to provide enterprise customers and business campuses with secure, reliable, high performing 5G VPN services and 5G private networks with new applications. Together we achieved another industry milestone by launching the world’s first commercial 5G SA network with network slicing for Fixed Wireless Access in Finland. With slicing, Telia will be able to offer customers a broad range of personalized connectivity based solutions depending on customer requirements, whilst maintaining a standards in its core infrastructure.

This type of technology leadership and innovation is made possible by Telia’s own digital transformation. At Telia we embrace cloud native across our architecture, including virtualization of our 5G core in all our markets. We are deeply engaged with the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture including Open APIs, and have adopted them across Telia to ensure standardization, scalability, efficiency, and interoperability. Our vision and execution of a digital-first, modern architecture underpins our 5G technology innovation across our markets.

A key enabler of this journey is to simplify our partnering. Shifting to fewer more purposeful partnerships at our core has allowed us to both work with and challenge our partners to deliver purposeful roadmaps compliant with the ODA principles allowing speed to market through simpler integration.  Allowing the development focus to shift to experience of our customers. Nokia joins us on this journey across key strategic initiatives, notably 5G, across all six markets.

Nokia understands that our partners like Telia are each taking their own journey of transformation. As the pace of change in our industry continues to accelerate, we take a very open approach to solution delivery – including active involvement in the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) – that helps our customers address the proliferation of applications, business models, and deployment models. Cognizant of the rising importance of enterprises to service providers’ 5G monetization strategies, we are partnering with Telia and other leading CSPs around the world to provide highly secure, automated, SaaS-based solutions that enable digitization of a wide variety of industries.

We both look forward to being back in person at Digital Transformation World. Please join us for our session “Choosing a digitalization strategy to meet your goals” on Tuesday, Sept 20, 2:30-4:00 where we will expand on the topics reviewed in this article.

See you in Copenhagen!