Finnish vendor Nokia has worked with Austrian telco A1 and Microsoft to complete a 5G Edge cloud network slicing trial.

The trio have called the trial an industry first.

The deployment was carried out on A1's live commercial network in Vienna, Austria, while using Nokia's 5G Edge slicing solution and Microsoft Azure managed Edge compute.

América Móvil-owned A1 demonstrated real-time HD video streaming during the trial by transmitting live camera feeds from several mobile devices using Multicasting.io’s streaming mobile platform, which ran on the Azure Edge infrastructure.

Nokia said that the 5G Edge cloud network slicing solution could be used by a range of enterprise industries, notably retail, media, utilities, healthcare, and transportation.

Network slicing effectively allows telecom operators to create separate and isolated networks for different use cases, while the slice can be configured differently.

The vendor explained that its 5G Edge slicing "allowed A1 to isolate its public Internet and enterprise traffic while keeping critical business traffic local using 4G/5G core breakout for enterprise Edge cloud applications."

Supporting the trial, Azure managed Edge compute was deployed at A1’s data center in Vienna with connectivity to the Azure region in Austria.

"This innovative solution enables A1 to deliver secure, reliable, and high-performance enterprise VPN services integrated with edge cloud applications over our 4G/LTE and 5G networks," said Marcus Grausam, CEO, A1.

"This collaboration opens up new business opportunities and demonstrates our commitment to delivering innovative services for our enterprise customers, as well as realizing the full potential of 5G technology."

Nokia, president of mobile networks, Tommi Uitto, added that 5G cloud Edge will "unlock further 5G monetization opportunities," while enhancing the overall enterprise customer experience.