Nokia Partners Singtel To Successfully Trial Asia Pacific’s First IP Transport Slicing on 5G Network

In a bid to enhance customer experience by delivering end-to-end service performance, Nokia in partnership with Singtel has successfully trialed 5G IP transport end-to-end network slicing. The trial is Asia Pacific’s first successful implementation of IP transport slicing across an end-to-end 5G network.

The Proof of Concept involved 5G radio, 5G core, and Nokia’s IP transport network slicing technology, and it was conducted in Singtel’s 5G Garage, a live test facility, training center, and ideation lab.

Delivering End-to-end Service

The technology that was developed was primarily concerned with assessing the solution’s capacity to provide end-to-end service performance for various network slices and optimize network resources as needed. With Nokia’s solution, network slicing across the IP transport network can be automated, improving the user experience for both business and consumer customers.

The Nokia solution will lower operational costs by better managing and utilizing network resources. Customers and businesses would have access to differentiated service performance because of end-to-end network slicing. It allows the provider to offer new services like 5G VPN and slicing for business applications, as well as improved gaming, HD streaming, and extended reality (XR).

Commenting on the successful trial, Tay Yeow Lian, Singtel’s Managing Director, of Networks Singapore, said the firm always seeks to provide the best value for its customers by constantly exploring new possibilities to improve the performance of its mobile network.

“We are always looking for new capabilities to enhance our mobile network performance to deliver the best value for our increasingly savvy customers and enterprises. Through this partnership, we can leverage the advanced capabilities of IP transport, integrated with 5G network slicing; to enhance our operational efficiency and customers’ experiences, said Tay. With end-to-end 5G network slicing, Singtel can further prioritize network resources with added security to support the rapid development of 5G use cases and deployment of complex applications.”

Singtel, Nokia, and its network partners collaborated to map the slice service properties across 3GPP and IETF specifications to enable end-to-end slicing. While IETF describes the IP transport equivalent, 3GPP specifies the network slicing capabilities in the 5G radio and core. The network can implement end-to-end slice performance and service differentiation thanks to its new approach.

Providing Best-in-class Network Performance

Nokia’s IP transport network slicing solution uses segment routing in conjunction with traffic engineering, resulting in a highly scalable and resilient network infrastructure. This makes it possible to achieve strict critical service SLAs through fine-grained service differentiation.

Federico Guillén, Nokia’s President of Network Infrastructure, said: the company’s IP transport network slicing solution is helping service providers address the growing demand for best-in-class network performance for 5G.

“Our IP transport network slicing solution is helping service providers like Singtel to address the growing demand for capacity while ensuring best-in-class network performance for 5G, consumer, and industrial applications,” said Federico.

“We are looking forward to working with Singtel, our longstanding partner, to help it expand its 5G services, support new capabilities, and guarantee network performance.”

Additionally, the Nokia Network Services Platform (NSP) offers a collection of tools for managing the entire lifecycle of transport slices as well as automation capabilities to support the realization of transport network slices using a variety of technologies, such as IP, segment routing, and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). The trial was carried out using the Nokia 7750 Service Router (SR) and NSP.