Nokia lands a few much-needed wins

Nokia’s rollercoaster ride continues with an up day, following the launch of its latest 5G Cloud RAN and a couple of handy deal wins.

Yesterday was a down day, with the news that it was going to let a bunch of people go at its Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary. But that’s today’s fish wrapper because Nokia’s embattled comms team has been able to ping out no less than three good news stories, just 24 hours later.

The biggest seems to be the commercialization of its next-generation 5G Cloud RAN. Nokia has largely dropped the ball on 5G and needs to offer the market something its competitors can’t. We don’t know if this is such a product, but virtualizing the RAN seems to be the direction of travel for the mobile network game, so Nokia is at least barking up the right tree.

“Nokia’s new vRAN2.0 solution introduces a virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) as well as a Fronthaul Gateway,” says the press release, and who are we to argue with it? “The result is a fully cloudified and disaggregated 5G base station that provides scalability, low latency, high performance and capacity, as well as several network architecture options, to meet ever-increasing market demands.” There’s loads of other stuff bigging it up, but you get the general drift.

“The next-generation Nokia 5G AirScale Cloud RAN is a true innovation that will transform mobile networks and provide operators with the flexibility they need to meet the customer demands in the evolving 5G era,” said Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia. “Its flexible architecture offers speed, coverage, capacity and low latency as well as the opportunity to generate revenues immediately.”

One company Nokia is helping immediately is Japanese car giant Toyota, which is getting it to make a private 5G network at its manufacturing design centre. This seems to be your classic Industry 4.0, smart factors, industrial IoT scenario, with the private network built to create some kind of permanently connected, Borg-like hive mind within the facility.

“Working with NSSOL as our systems integration partner, our 5G-ready private wireless network solution will enable TPEC (Toyota Production Engineering Corporation) to integrate next-generation manufacturing use cases that help accelerate its digital transformation, and realize its future automotive IoT vision.,” said Donny Janssens, Customer Team Head of Enterprise at Nokia Japan. “Together with NSSOL, and Toyota’s closest partner TPEC, we are delivering a breakthrough in the domestic automotive industry.”

Lastly Nokia has been selected as the sole optical kit vendor for National Broadband Ireland, a government-backed consortium that’s in charge of connecting 540,000 premises in rural Ireland. It will provide all the active equipment, including a PON FTTH network and an aggregation network and a performance management solution.

All the quotes were about how important broadband is, so we’ll spare you them. While none of them are game-changers, these three bits of news offer a welcome contrast from yesterday’s redundancies revelation and the steady drip of downbeat news that seems to have come from Nokia over the past year or two. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.