Nokia, Smart bringing Industry 4.0 to Southeast Asia following 5G trial

Nokia and Smart, PLDT’s mobile arm, are working together to bring Industry 4.0 to Southeast Asia.

This follows the recent announcement that Nokia and Smart were first in the Philippines, and the Southeast Asian region, to complete a live 5G ‘standalone’ video call. Standalone refers to systems, such as Nokia’s cloud native core solutions, that are entirely 5G-based and do not rely on previous generations’ network architecture.

Standalone systems will become increasingly important as the Philippines and the entire Southeast Asian region moves towards Industry 4.0, in which industry becomes increasingly connected.

According to McKinsey and Company, Industry 4.0 is expected to deliver between $216 billion and $627 billion in value amongst the member economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

A key component of this architecture is network slicing, which allows service providers to partition their networks into discrete ‘slices’ to support specific use cases or sectors. Coupled with ultra-reliable low-latency capability, network slicing will enable the delivery of new use cases, such as real-time remote control of robotics, autonomous transport vehicles and other enterprise-led 5G use cases.

Andrew Cope, Head of Philippines at Nokia, said: “Southeast Asia is already home to the world’s top social media users, and 5G will bring them faster connections, but its true beneficiaries will be industry sectors. The trial we conducted with Smart shows that Industry 4.0 can become reality for the Southeast Asian region. The opportunities are immense, and we are looking forward to working with Smart to allow the Philippines, and the wider region, to reap the rewards of 5G.”

Joachim Horn, Chief Technology and Information Advisor at PLDT and Smart, said: “By working with partners like Nokia in unlocking the full potential of 5G for Filipino enterprises and customers, we are putting the Philippines at par with the rest of the world in preparing for the deployment and adoption of 5G. It gives us great pleasure to be one of the pioneers of the 5G SA deployment in the region and we are looking forward to moving onto larger scale deployment of 5G to tap into new business and industrial opportunities - to help transform the face of the country’s economy."