Elisa 5G network in Turku will be the widest in the Nordic Countries during spring 2019. At the same time Elisa and the City of Turku will start a significant three-year 5G partnership project which involves different measures to take advantage of new technology as well as concrete targets of piloting.

Elisa and the City of Turku have started together a three-year 5G partnership project, the first concrete results of which can be expected already this year. The partnership project aims to strengthen Turku’s position as a smart city by using 5G. The Future Today Institute in the United States published in March a Tech Trends report which ranked Turku the 7th in the comparison between the hundred smartest cities. The ranking was the best among Finnish cities.

- One of the most important reasons for the success of Turku is the progressive use of mobile technology. This will again rise to a new level along with the 5G network built by Elisa. The partnership brings new services and practical applications to the citizens of Turku among the first ones in the world, Strategy and Development Director of the City of Turku Jussi Vira says, delighted.

The 5G plans of the city and Elisa are directly linked with the focal points of the Smart and Wise spearhead project of Turku, such as traffic, mobility and security. The first concrete experiments have already been agreed on.

- The first to pilot the 5G will be our information management where we will test what possibilities the 5G mobile network with its high capacity and short delays brings to the office work. One of the other experiments being planned is a robot bus, in the remote control of which the 5G will have an important role, Vira continues.

The first 5G cafes in the world to Turku

The citizens of Turku will experience the benefits of the 5G already from 15 April when Coffee House at Wiklund of Turun Osuuskauppa will presumably become the first 5G café in the world. The customers at the café will get to use the Elisa 5G network by WiFi. There is more to come in May when student canteen Galilei of Åbo Akademi University and Turku University will also get the 5G network.

- It is important that the 5G is visible in the citizens’ daily life because it is the citizens that the network is built for. After the widening of the network to be done now, already one third of the citizens in Turku live in the area of the Elisa 5G network and the network covers the whole city centre of Turku. The cafes are excellent places to test the features of the 5G, says Regional Director of Elisa in Western Finland Juha Laukkanen.

Elisa is the first operator in Finland which has opened 5G networks in several cities in Finland. At the moment there are networks in Helsinki, Tampere, Jyväskylä and Turku. New networks will be built in other cities in 2019. In February Elisa announced that it will launch 5G terminal devices of several manufacturers during this year.

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