Telia declares Finland is ready for the 5G promised land

Finland is set to be one of the first nations in Europe to experience the wonders of 5G as Telia targets the beginning of 2019 for commercial launch.

With tests in the Telia 5G Arena in Helsinki completed, the first base stations in the city operational and the first phase of roll-out set to be completed in the Autumn, Telia has confidently proclaimed full-scale commercial operation will be possible in 2019, just as soon as the 3.5 GHz 5G frequency auction has been conducted.

“For two years we have prepared for 5G with demos and trials,” said Jari Collin, CTO at Telia Finland. “We set up the 5G Finland cooperation network to create and pilot 5G services with our partners, and now we can continue exploring the possibilities of 5G in a real live network.”

It is certainly a bold promise to make, though seeing as this launch will be prior to the availability of 5G devices, who is going to know whether those crafty Finns are telling the truth or not. The on switch could well be hooked up to a couple of dozen pink and green light-bulbs spelling out ‘viides sukupolvi’ and nothing else; who would be able to tell?

Perhaps the reason we can joke about the Finns having a network and no flashy devices is because it’s probably a better way to have it than the other way around. Some might mock the idea of boasting of 5G with no consumer devices to make use of it, but upon the launch of said devices, consumers in other nations will own very expensive, glitzy smartphones, connected to an imaginary 5G network.

Progress has been steady in the Telia business. It is now boasting of getting to a point where all 5G network components are available, from 3GPP specification-based radio access to high capacity IP networks, virtualized core and the massive computing capacity offered by its Helsinki data centre.

“We are pleased to begin the deployment of the first 5G base stations in Finland – the Nokia AirScale radio access –  and we will continue working with Telia Company to identify the technologies and services that meet the demands of consumers and industries in the 5G era,” said Jan Lindgren, Head of Telia Customer Team at Nokia, a key partner of the project.

While the 5G posturing has largely been left to telcos in the US, China or Korea, Telia has slipped through the peloton relatively undetected, and could in fact be one of the first worldwide to hit the on-switch. Considering the rather humble progress made by the Telia team, who would have thought we would have been saying that.