A customer-centric private 5G experience

But a meaningful service offering is about more than making powerful technology available. The customers who are demanding private 5G solutions often have very different needs than regular end-users in the B2B market. To really understand and respond to the customer needs in these segments an ecosystem needs to be in place. An ecosystem capable of managing the complexities these clients are faced with – while also delivering a seamless, and user-friendly customer experience.

In this light, and alongside strong partners, the Telenor Research & Innovation team set out to develop a partner ecosystem in a testbed environment for advanced private 5G.

A key component of this pilot is the customer portal, powered by fast-developing Generative AI technology. The portal prototype has been developed by Nokia and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model to translate customer needs and expectations, written in natural language into specific private 5G service orders. In this way, the portal can serve customers from across a range of industries, without resorting to the technical language used to describe 5G network technologies and operations.

The intelligent customer portal supports TM Forum Open APIs TMF921 for intent management. This allows intents to be expressed, reported on and negotiated between the intent owner and the intent handler. The Open APIs are also a key enabler in the effort to facilitate intent-driven, multi-layer, autonomous networks. The intent APIs are sent to an end-to-end service orchestrator, also provided by Nokia, which is integrated with multiple private 5G networks. These private 5G networks can be supplied by selected partners and are capable of being deployed to different locations and for different purposes. A rich portfolio of private 5G networks is essential to providing tailor-made services to client industries and governments.

Customization allows service providers to deploy advanced 5G, AI, and cloud technologies in individual private 5G environments and differentiate the 5G services to target industries. At the time of writing, this ecosystem can provide the following five types of private 5G networks with specialized services:

• Mobile 5G capable of delivering mission-critical services: Network on Wheels is a private 5G network deployed on vehicles which can quickly be moved to a dedicated location whenever the need arises (e.g., for emergency services operating in remote locations). The core network is provided by Cumucore and is equipped with edge computing resources, which allow customers to install specific services relevant to their needs. Currently, a mission-critical service provided by Airbus is available to serve customers working with Public Protection and Disaster Relief.

• 5G with network exposure capabilities: In this set-up a multi-vendor 5G network slice is created jointly by three partners: ENEA, Oracle, and i2i systems. This private 5G network is equipped with an advanced Network Exposure Function provided by Oracle, which puts key capabilities in the hands of customers. One such is enabling them to exercise policy control. The process is kept simple and seamless through the use of the Global Telco API Alliance’s CAMARA APIs, provided by Nokia Network as Code. The exposure capability and CAMARA APIs are significant for telcos’ capacity to fuel innovation and downstream adoption. This is especially relevant for customers and third-party developers aiming to optimize their applications by controlling network operations. In the forestry sector, Nokia Real-time eXtended Reality Multimedia cameras are used to monitor conditions on the ground. In this example, a Quality-on-Demand CAMARA API is useful for both the forestry customer and the telco. Since the multimedia camera is equipped with video compression, high-quality videos can be supported even with low network bandwidth, and customers can reduce the bandwidth requirements for the camera application if other high-priority applications need more network resources. If for instance a fire is detected by the monitoring cameras, the rescue task force might well require quick access to mission-critical applications such as group video conferences.

• Portable 5G with moving 5G coverage and GPU resources: If a wildfire occurs, the work of firefighters, first responders, and rescue teams could be assisted if a private 5G network with high-quality service was deployed in a forest areas with no vehicle access and poor 5G coverage. An airborne 5G node, provided by Nokia, with tethered drones provided by Airolit, would be able to significantly extend the 5G coverage area. This could be augmented by 5G modems fitted onto normal drones, which would be able to further widen a search area. Vision AI could also be leveraged to speed up the rescue effort, if a ruggedized roving edge server, in this case provided by Oracle and equipped with GPU, is deployed in the field. This would host both a 5G core network, provided by Druid, but also resource-demanding AI applications dedicated to object detection capable of quickly locating missing persons.

• Real-time 5G: In Industry 4.0 and eHealth, ultra-low latency is essential. This is critically important for robotics arms and hands that are remotely controlled by humans. In this use case, gloves equipped with sensors are provided by the University of Oslo, and a local telco edge cloud is deployed on the premises and connected to a dedicated network slice in the central core. This dedicated network is supported by i2i systems. The network slice is further upgraded to support RedCap technology, also by i2i systems, so that end users can deploy RedCap cameras to ensure efficient surveillance during the monitoring of the robotics arms & hands movements.

• Resilient 5G: The population of the Svalbard archipelago, 800 kilometres off the northern coast of Norway, is fully reliant on access to resilient connectivity. To meet this need, a private 5G network with two 5G core networks from Druid has been deployed on the islands. These are equipped with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and are running on a public cloud. This means that additional to the primary network, another on-premises network is at hand as backup. If the connection to the primary 5G core network is compromised, the secondary 5G core is immediately activated to ensure operational access.