Nokia announced an industry group led by its Bell Labs established a project called WIVE (WIreless for VErticals) “to make it possible for new types of industries to gain competitive advantage from the latest wireless technologies, especially 5G.”

The project is co-funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, with partners including Telia and the Finnish communications regulatory authority.

WIVE is planned to run for 2 years and will focus on the needs of the media and entertainment sector as well as machine-type connectivity for application areas including ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC), serving sectors like smart grids and remotely controlled machines.

It will also look into massive machine type connectivity (mMTC), allowing a high number of devices to be connected with limited cost and energy consumption.

“WIVE aims to develop concepts and enable technologies, as well as to test and experiment new vertical services offered by 5G, especially for URLLC, mMTC, and media content delivery. These new communication services have versatile requirements for reliability, latency, data rates, security and availability. The WIVE project aims to demonstrate that these requirements can be fulfilled with future 5G networks with improved flexibility and cost-efficiency,” Nokia said in a statement.

WIVE will also investigate and promote flexible spectrum policies and spectrum management schemes to unlock new spectrum assets for 5G.

Last week at MWC Americas, Nokia North America CTO Mike Murphy said the transformation to 5G will require a significant restructuring of operator networks rather than just incremental changes. Adjusting to improve distribution and keep latency low is at the top of the list, he said.