Nokia Bell Labs, the research division of the Finnish technology firm, has announced a collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders to develop a next-generation 5G Platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS).
The initiative brings together industry vendors, network operators, IT firms, small and medium-sized enterprises, and European academic institutions. These partners will work together over a 24-month period to advance 5G platform technology. The effort is coordinated under the 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP), which acts as an intermediary between the European Union and telecommunications industry participants.
As more companies adopt cloud-first strategies, the emergence of 5G in the market aligns with the need for cloud-native innovations. This trend highlights limits of the current telco Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) approach and points to the need for a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model tailored to 5G requirements.
A cloud-native 5G platform should deliver two primary capabilities:
- First, it must support the building, packaging, and operation of virtual network functions (VNFs) with telco-grade characteristics — low latency, high reliability, and scalable capacity — to realize the full performance potential of 5G.
- Second, it should enable seamless integration of third-party applications with VNFs, creating versatile cloud services that bridge connectivity (for people, robots, sensors, and other devices) and compute-intensive workloads such as machine learning, big data analytics, and video processing.
Although such a comprehensive platform does not yet exist, the consortium intends to create it through the NGPaaS project.
Bessem Sayadi, consortium project leader and research manager at Nokia Bell Labs, explained the project’s aim: “Our ambition in developing a next-generation PaaS is to enable developers across the 5G ecosystem — operators, vendors, and third parties — to collaborate and drive new business models. This collaboration should expand market opportunities and improve the economics of the market.”