Nokia confirms its position with 42 commercial 5G deals (more than any other vendor has announced) in place with mobile operators (Telcos) around the world, 22 with named customers such as T-Mobile, Telia Company and Softbank. The company said including these agreements, Nokia’s 5G deals, trials and demos totaling over 100 5G customer engagements to date.
Since the announcement of the 30th commercial 5G contract at the end of March the company has seen an average of one major contract win each week – with a steady pipeline in place for further agreements, it said.
One of the deals include a recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that was signed with Malaysia-based U Mobile mid last month. As part of the MoU, Nokia and U Mobile will conduct trial of a live 5G network in Malaysia. The trial will be done later this year and will demonstrate the 5G capability of enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) as well as other 5G use cases such as in the fields of virtual reality (VR) and e-sports. U Mobile is also currently deploying Nokia’s AirScale base stations, now 5G-ready.
With an end-to-end portfolio that is unique in the industry, Nokia said it can work in partnership with mobile operators to deliver “real 5G”. Nokia’s in house 5G mmWave Small Cells and AirScale BTS provide in-building and outdoor coverage, while its Microwave Anyhaul, Cloud native RAN, antennas, and 5G cloud-native core are part of approximately half of our agreements to date. Beyond its mobile networks portfolio, Nokia has FP4 network processor-based IP routers and PSE- 3 chipset powered optical networking – which customers can use the Nokia Network Services Platform to make this into full-5G-strength software defined connectivity ‘smart network fabric’ secured by Nokia Security Orchestration, Analytics and Response (Nokia SOAR) to ensure resilient 5G.
Early rollouts of 5G have been well publicized in North America, Korea and Europe and the company said it is looking forward to announcing its work with operators in emerging nations and regions such as India and Latin America over the coming months.
Nokia President and Chief Executive Officer Rajeev Suri says: “The pace of 5G progress is accelerating across the globe. We are delivering significant performance increases to operators and the power of Nokia’s end-to-end portfolio is being recognized. In fact, in pretty much every network where Nokia products are deployed, we are the performance leader. Here and now – at the beginning of one of the most radical technology transitions ever with 4G giving way to 5G – this is Nokia’s time to shine.”
