Elisa picks Ericsson to debut 5G standalone subscriptions in Finland

Elisa, in partnership with Ericsson, have commercially launched a 5G standalone (SA) network, bringing the most advanced mobile connectivity available to Finland.

With Elisa’s new 5G standalone network powered by Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G Core, Elisa introduces 5G SA as a new premium service to its customers. Adding to this, customers are offered home broadband through Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). The new mobile service provides lightning-fast speeds, stable and uniform connectivity, and Elisa estimates up to 50 percent lower latency compared to non-standalone (NSA). Battery life of devices connected to the 5G standalone network will also last up to 15–20% longer.

Ilkka Pohtola, the director responsible for consumer subscriptions at Elisa says: “In addition to the user benefits and power savings, the 5G standalone network will continue to improve the energy efficiency of the mobile network, consuming less energy per unit of data transferred than older network technologies”.

The new 5G SA network gets added to Elisa’s existing 5G network, which already covers more than 90 percent of the Finnish population.

By utilizing network slicing, a technology that reserves parts of the network to provide tailored services for different applications and users, Elisa paves the way for new innovation opportunities and next generation use cases including applications for events, gaming, smart factories and connected vehicles and more.

Nora Wahby, Head of Customer Unit Northern, Ericsson says, Ericsson, says: “The way consumers engage with 5G is changing, creating a world of new opportunities to offer and capture 5G value. Elisa has been a longstanding pioneer in this field, and this latest development is a significant milestone to further accelerate next-generation digitalization in Finland.”

The 5G SA launch is the latest milestone in Ericsson and Elisa’s longstanding journey to accelerate next-generation digitalization. In 2020, the partnership established the Nordic’s first end-to-end 5G SA connection, after which Ericsson was selected to provide the 5G Core network to support Elisa Estonia’s 5G SA rollout. Further milestones were achieved when the two companies announced Elisa was the first service provider in Europe to deploy In-Service Software Upgrade capability on a live production 5G Standalone (SA) network powered by Ericsson.

With this new network based on Ericsson’s Cloud Native Infrastructure Solution (CNIS), Elisa stands to benefit further from advantages such as better speed of change and improved efficiency, higher network performance and greater openness.

As Elisa has just launched it’s 5G SA network, the three partners Elisa, Ericsson and chipset vendor Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. achieved an impressive upload speed of 230 Mbps.