Nokia and Telefonica team up for Spanish private networks push

Under a three-year agreement the vendor will deploy 100 Digital Automation Cloud (DAC), Modular Private Wireless (MPW), and MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) solutions for the telco in its Spanish business units Telefonica Mobile Spain, Telefonica IoT & Big Data Tech Spain, and the opco’s Telefonica IoT & Big Data Tech.

Further, the collaboration will see industrial devices deployed to meet the needs of what is stated as “key mission-critical industries such as ports, manufacturing, and logistics”. This is to improve “productivity, worker safety, and sustainability” in the Spanish enterprise market.

Research by Analyst house Omdia has shown that the enterprise basic needs, including connected worker, worker safety, physical security, predictive maintenance, and asset tracking applications are key in the race to win in 5G private networks.

“This exciting collaboration with Telefonica will continue enabling enterprises to pave the way to digitalization.” said Rolf Albrecht, Head of Enterprise Campus Edge Business at Nokia. “Our private wireless and edge on-prem solutions are designed to meet the mission-critical needs of asset-intensive industries, providing them with benefits beyond connectivity, including increased worker safety and reduction of emissions per our latest 2024 report for industrial digitalization.”

The DAC, MXIE, industrial devices, and digitalisation applications fall under the Nokia one platform for industrial digitalization and are reportedly designed to simplify digital transformation for a host of industries. This will be achieved by delivering a secure, reliable, and high-performing wireless infrastructure. In addition, an on-prem compute for tapping into real-time OT data will accelerate digital transformation.

"This collaboration with Nokia aligns with our vision of empowering the industry with cutting-edge technology in a new era where Artificial Intelligence and the use of data lead the way forward.” said Business Director, Adrian Garcia Nevado of Telefonica Spain. “This strategy is preceded by more than 90 use cases with real customers for exploring the capabilities of 5G”.

To date, Nokia states it has deployed mission-critical networks worldwide to more than 2,600 enterprise customers. These include the transportation, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale, and public sector segments worldwide.

While telecom professionals have long seen private 5G as key to monetisation, market growth seemed to have lagged somewhat behind, typically due to disparities between enterprise needs versus market offerings. But a recent survey report by Nokia claims 93% of private network early adopters achieving their ROI within the first year of deployment. If these claims are representative of the whole market, then perhaps there is more optimism for market boost and with announcements such as the present one today.