Nokia opens India 6G lab, wins Brazil deals

Finnish kit maker Nokia has been globetrotting this week, opening a new research facility in India and winning new customers in Brazil.

Starting with the former, Nokia has launched a new 6G lab at its Bengaluru R&D site that focuses on some of 6G’s fundamental technologies and potential use cases.

First and foremost is the idea of the network as a sensor. It’s the idea that the network is able to detect objects, people and movement without the need for on-board sensors.

Nokia claims it is key to bridging the gap between physical and digital environments, and will enable people to interact with their surroundings in new but intuitive ways, and even let them see round corners, apparently. It sounds gimmicky, but in areas like transportation, for example, having detailed, real-time information about the immediate vicinity would no doubt prove useful.

The lab will also take a look at network automation, privacy, algorithms, and sustainable system design.

In parallel with the new lab, Nokia said it is also building up partnerships with leading research institutes, like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

These efforts are all part of Nokia’s contribution to ‘Bharat 6G Vision’, the ambitious plan – announced in March by prime minister Narendra Modi – to launch 6G in India by 2030.

“The inauguration of the Nokia 6G research lab in Bengaluru today is another step towards PM Narendra Modi’s vision of making India an innovation hub,” noted Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of railways, communications, electronics and IT. “Interesting use cases coming out of this lab will be related to transportation safety, health care and education which will be another big contribution in the entire Digital India suite.”

Elsewhere, Nokia has also been busy on the other side of the world this week.

On Wednesday, Brazilian agricultural machine maker Jacto selected Nokia to deploy a private 5G network at its new smart factory, currently under construction in the province of Sao Paulo. Once built, the 96,000 square metre site will house an automated painting system, autonomous vehicle control, and an automated storage system. The plant will also include a training centre.

“The new plant will serve both domestic and foreign markets, with product lines for spraying, fertilizing, planting, harvesting coffee and sugar cane, in addition to precision agriculture, digital technology and autonomous vehicles,” said Jacto president Fernando Gonçalves.

All these systems will connect to Nokia’s network, which will operate LTE at 700 MHz and 5G at 3.7 GHz, providing a high capacity, highly-responsive, pervasive coverage. Nokia will also provide a whole host of services, including installation, configuration, training and assisted operations.

“We consulted several players in the telecommunications market, and Nokia was the one that presented the best proposal in terms of quality, robustness and scalability of the product to meet our project,” Gonçalves said.

Nokia claims this is the first deal of its kind in Latin America, and it is in line with the vendor’s plan to grow enterprise revenues by driving the uptake of industry 4.0 technology.

Sticking with Brazil, Nokia also won a deal with B2B ISP K2 Telecom, under which it will supply various network and cybersecurity solutions. These will enable K2 to offer new wholesale broadband services and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection.

According to Nokia’s own research, IoT botnet DDoS traffic grew fivefold over the past year. These leverage insecure IoT devices to bombard servers with traffic, knocking them offline.

Its Deepfield Defender solution can identify and classify Internet traffic into 30 different categories, helping to detect potential DDoS attacks. Nokia says the K2 deal marks the first deployment of Deepfield Defender in Latin America.

“Currently, in the market, there are companies that offer DDoS mitigation and protection services. However, these companies often redirect unwanted traffic to external clouds, which in turn causes disruptions for end customers. Our customers should not be affected by internal processes and with Nokia’s solution, mitigation is performed internally, directly in the routers’ chipset, in real-time, and without causing unavailability for our customers,” said K2’s CTO Leandro Garcia.

“This project is further proof of Nokia’s increasing footprint in the ISP market,” added Carlos Barroso, IP leader for LatAm at Nokia. “We thank K2 Telecom for their trust and confidence in Nokia, and we are looking forward to collaborating on other projects as they continue to expand in Brazil with innovative B2B ISP services.”

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