Nokia today revealed details about its network slicing software that will be commercially available before the end of the year. The vendor- and network-agnostic software will allow network operators to spin up and scale down virtual slices of their respective networks for various uses.

Network slicing is a key development packed into the numerous standards and features of 5G, and it’s expected to start gaining traction as a means for operators to assemble private or app-specific networks on the fly. 

Nokia’s Digital Operations Center, which automates the process for designing and operating these network slices, also integrates with the Finnish vendor’s orchestration and assurance software stacks to adhere to service-level agreements (SLAs), explained Brian McCann, chief product officer at Nokia Software.

The software is being used in trials by Singtel in Singapore and three other companies that Nokia declined to name. Some of those trial customers have Nokia equipment in their networks, but most of them don’t, according to McCann.

The new development from Nokia comes just two days after it announced an aggressive open radio access network (RAN) portfolio that could further reposition the company as an open vendor willing to rethink its long held proprietary approach to network equipment in particular.

Nokia doesn’t want to embolden the perception of vendor lock-in with its network slicing software and is committed to keeping it open and configurable across hybrid networks using equipment and software from multiple vendors, according to McCann. This is also true for most of the applications from Nokia Software, he added.

“No one’s ever going to have the luxury of having, you know, all with one vendor. It’s not what our customers want, it’s not what most service providers want. They want to be able to pick and choose what they want,” McCann said. “This is built up from the ground up to be network and vendor agnostic.”

Nokia is also striving to facilitate agility for its customers with the software by providing automation controls that will remove complexities and the need for Nokia to be heavily involved as an advisor or troubleshooting resource, according to McCann. “In order to really scale up in this environment, the cloud-native aspect of the application will come into play. We need to be able to scale up and do a lot more quicker, and then likewise scale down and grow as our customers grow around delivering services.”

While Nokia’s network slicing software will work with other vendors’ equipment, its expertise on RAN and operations is a point of differentiation for the company among other network slicing vendors, he added. “Most of our competitors in the digital operations area that we’re talking about here are the vendors that really don’t have that heritage of the network side,” he said.

“We really leverage that knowledge, inherent knowledge of network expertise, to simplify things up at the service and operational level, so I think that’s going to be the main differentiator” for Nokia, McCann said. Many network slicing vendors are providing a toolkit that has to be custom built for each customer, but Nokia is providing templates that can be augmented by each respective customer, he explained. 

Customers that are most excited about network slicing view it as a way to build new 5G services around virtualized segments of the network, but McCann expects some to eventually do more integration work with their legacy equipment and maybe even replace some of the legacy software currently running in their pre-5G network infrastructure. 

Network slicing should see significant uptake by mid 2021, and it should be in widespread deployment by 2022, McCann said.