It's been a possible week at Nokia, as the company makes a series of technical announcements, secures two major contracts and announces the appointment of its month-old new CEO. Nokia is looking to secure a significant share of the 5G equipment market, presenting itself as a "one-stop shop" for carriers and telcos with a portfolio that spans radio, transport and core network layers. However, the Finnish mobile giant has struggled in recent months due to the double pressure of intense competition and the high cost of developing 5G technologies. Earlier this week, it was announced that a third of the jobs at the Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary would be cut to reduce spending.
Nokia 5G
So the fact that it won a private 5G deal with Toyota and a major fiber contract with the Irish government provided good news. Nokia will build an industrial-grade cellular network at the Toyota Manufacturing Design Center in Fukuoka, Japan, to assess how LTE and 5G can support IoT devices, scanning, and equipment virtualization in the production process. If successful, the technology will be deployed at more sites, helping Toyota transform applications and workflows and automate the automation of its facilities. National Broadband Ireland (NBI) is a government-backed initiative to extend fiber coverage to 540,000 rural people in the country. Nokia has won the entire tender and will provide IP routing and optical network technology for the project. "We look forward to working with Nokia because the company has experience in similar projects on a global scale, as well as the technological capabilities and end-to-end portfolio for a project like this," said Peter Hendrick, CEO of National Broadband Ireland. Technically, Nokia has completed the first trial of a 5G network based on C-band spectrum in the United States. US carriers will use C-band spectrum, between 3,4 GHz and 4,2 GHz, to provide a mix of capacity and coverage to customers. North America will be a key market for Nokia due to Huawei's inability to compete. Nokia also announced the commercial launch of its new AirScale cloud-based RAN technology, which is expected to be widely available in 2021. AirScale is a key product for Nokia, making the platform a means for operators to maximize their spectrum and your network assets in the 5G era. "Nokia's next generation 5G AirScale Cloud RAN is a true innovation that will transform mobile networks and provide operators with the flexibility they need to meet customer demands in the evolving era of 5G," added Tommi Uitto, President of Networks phones at Nokia. "Its flexible architecture offers speed, coverage, capacity and low latency, as well as the ability to generate revenue immediately." Finally, the departure date of Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri was moved up due to the early availability of his replacement Pekka Lundmark. Fortnum CEO Lundmark was scheduled to join on September 1, but his own replacement will be appointed on July 1. After a transition period of one month, Lundmark will be free to join Nokia.