Nokia finally replaces Huawei at 3,000 Deutsche Telekom 5G sites

This news will come as no great surprise to readers of our sister site Light Reading, which got the scoop straight from President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, Tommi Uitto, at MWC earlier this year. "We won this flagship deal with Deutsche Telekom in Germany to replace some of their installed base with Huawei," said Uitto at the time. "It is 3,000 sites of replacement, plus then there would be new sites, in one part of the network in Germany."

Why that move took a further nine months to gestate is anyone’s guess but at least they got there in the end. Having said that, the 'new sites' still seem to just be a glint in Uitto’s eye, so maybe we’ll hear about them next summer. The release doesn’t specifically name Huawei as the replaced vendor but both Nokia and DT have separately confirmed that’s the case.

“While others talk about doing Open RAN, Nokia is actually doing it and doing it on a grand scale,” said Uitto in today’s press release. “This is a significant deal for Nokia as we have been selected by the largest network operator in Europe to extend our partnership. We are proud to have been chosen because of our technology leadership, innovative product portfolio, and open approach. We look forward to expanding our partnership further in the future.”

“This deal is further evidence of our significant commitment to multi-vendor Open RAN and ensuring we have greater supplier choice for radio access networks,” said DT Group CTO Abdu Mudesir. The network performance in the already implemented area is delivering the best customer experience. And now together with Nokia, we look forward to scaling up Open RAN in Germany.”

It’s worth examining the Open RAN angle more closely, since they’re both labouring the point so much. Uitto’s dig is presumably aimed at Ericsson’s big deal with AT&T which, coincidentally, was a major blow for Nokia. While Ericsson and AT&T made a fuss about the new kit being Open RAN compliant, it was still a single vendor deal, thus somewhat defeating the point of Open RAN.

This DT deal features Japanese vendor Fujitsu, which will supply its Open RAN-compliant mid-band remote radio head products. You have to wonder if those radios require fans for cooling. The use of the term ‘remote’ suggests not all of those 3,000 sites in the Neubrandenburg area will use Fujitsu radios, however, with the rest reverting to the single vendor paradigm Uitto was so keen to sneer at. Specifically Nokia’s Habrok Massive MIMO radios.

Still, Nokia has plenty of reason to celebrate this development, having been unceremoniously booted out of DT’s wireless network back in 2018. While Uitto’s point about extending their partnership feels a bit misleading, he’ll be hoping this is the thin end of the wedge, resulting in a further increase in Nokia’s DT 5G site share beyond the 12% this deal represents. It might even persuade T-Mobile US that Nokia is worth sticking with.

Another belated aspect to this development is the replacement of Huawei in DT’s mobile network. Germany has lagged the rest of America’s sphere of influence in replacing ‘high risk vendors’ and DT even indicated it might look for some kind of compromise earlier this year. That might still happen but this move suggests otherwise, so it will be interesting to see how DT’s 5G strategy develops, both with respect to Open RAN and to the replacement of Huawei.