Nokia, Chunghwa Telecom Accelerate 5G Expansion in Taiwan

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Nokia has announced that it has been chosen by Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) to expand the operator’s 5G network in Taiwan. The deal aims to support CHT’s objective of achieving 80 percent population coverage as well as boost 5G subscriptions to over 20 percent of its current subscriber base. The expansion will leverage products from Nokia’s AirScale portfolio to deliver enhanced connectivity for people and businesses in the southern and central areas of the country.

The expansion, which supports Chunghwa Telecom’s primary business objective to accelerate 5G rollout this year, focuses on high traffic areas, as well as locations with high business demand, including metropolitan cities, universities, subways, high-speed rail stations, industrial parks, and exhibition halls, and over 120 highly populated tourist hotspots. CHT is also looking to further expand its enterprise footprint by enhancing its 4G/5G coverage as well as deploying private network solutions.

The network will also be designed specifically to leverage Nokia’s competitive 5G radio solutions to support enterprise use cases. CHT will strengthen its cooperation with leading local manufacturers for industrial 4.0 applications using solutions in 3.5GHz and 28GHz spectrum to meet the high throughput requirements.

The deal includes the deployment of products from Nokia’s AirScale portfolio, including AirScale base stations and AirScale radio access products. These will include industry-leading Massive MIMO radios, enabling CHT to boost the capacity of the existing spectrum and increase throughput. Nokia’s AirScale products offer huge capacity scaling and market-leading latency and connectivity, as well as supporting current and future technology trends, including network slicing and Cloud RAN.

In addition, Nokia will continue its long-term vendor partnership with Chunghwa Telecom with ongoing support for 5G coverage enhancement, enterprise entry and enhancement, network optimization and Cloud RAN transformation.

Dr. Alex C.C. Chien, President of Mobile Business Group, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. said: “Supporting our enterprise and individual customers through advanced 5G services is an important focus for Chunghwa Telecom. We are committed to retaining our position as the number one mobile operator in Taiwan by delivering new and innovative services for our customers. Nokia continues to be a trustworthy and hard-working partner for Chunghwa Telecom throughout our journey.”

Mark Atkinson, SVP, Radio Access Networks PLM at Nokia at Nokia, said: “The Taiwan mobile market is highly competitive, driven by an expectation for innovative and high-quality services demanded by subscribers. Next-generation networks are enabling the types of immersive and productivity-driven mobile services that Taiwanese people expect, so we are excited to support Chunghwa Telecom by expanding its 5G network.”