Finnish mobile network operator (MNO) Elisa plans to begin upgrading its existing infrastructure in Turku and its surroundings in March 2018 with a view to making it ready for 5G services. In a press release outlining its plans the cellco said it will upgrade its mobile network in the Turku region by replacing existing base station hardware with the latest technology, and with construction to start next month, it anticipates that the upgrade project will be finished by the end of May.
This announcement comes just a week after Elisa announced it had taken ‘yet another step towards 5G networks’, with it claiming to have become the first in the world to test 5G terminal devices in a pre-standard 5G network. As part of its tests, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and game applications were tested in a 5G network that Elisa and Chinese vendor Huawei had built in Pasila, Helsinki, operating over spectrum in the 3.5GHz band.
Commenting on its latest plans, Juha Laukkanen, Elisa’s Regional Director for western Finland, said: ‘Over the course of spring, we are going to build a 5G-ready network using the latest technology available in the Turku region. It means that in the future, it will be easy to add features required in 5G services to the network, for instance, considerably faster data transfer speeds, short delay and functionalities needed in the Internet of Things.’