Oulu Finland: 5G Lives Here

The sun never sets on the 5G network in Oulu. Well, maybe it dips below the horizon just a bit. But at midnight on a Tuesday morning in June, it looks like 4:00 in the afternoon, and the local pub is full of engineers attending a big European 5G conference.

- Sascha Segan

The pub isn’t always that full on a Tuesday, the local barflies tell me. But Oulu, a city of about 200,000 up near the Arctic Circle, is always full of engineers. It’s a perfect example of something America needs more of: a city whose major industrial employer crashed but which then reinvented itself. Out of the crumbling hulk of Nokia has come what may be the northernmost startup scene in the world, with dozens of smaller companies now filling up Nokia’s old offices at the edge of town.

If anywhere is 5G Town, Oulu is. It’s home to not just one but three 5G test networks, and it’s where Nokia (still) is building its 5G base stations. It was 4G Town, too, and probably 2G Town before that, and then, back in the 1970s, Radio Town. If you want to figure out what people are going to be doing with the multi-billion-dollar next-gen networks we’ll start seeing in the U.S. in 2018 and 2019, you’ll probably find a wider variety of people thinking about it in Oulu than almost anywhere else. Certainly more than anywhere else with 200,000 people. Definitely more than anywhere else in the Arctic.

I came to Oulu looking for 5G because we’re about to have a great wave of 5G crashing on our shores. U.S. carriers led the world in 4G LTE, which enabled widespread streaming media and social image networks. Now they’re poised to do the same with 5G. Verizon and AT&T will launch pre-standard 5G networks used for home Internet later this year, followed by T-Mobile with a purely mobile network in 2019.