Nokia balanced MWC 2025 developments in its core telecom business with a new 5G.MIL partnership with Lockheed Martin and Verizon, plus closing the Infinera deal
BARCELONA—Nokia’s announcements this week reflect both the company’s telecom roots and its efforts to pursue strategic opportunities outside of telecom, with a particular focus on the defense market, and on data centers and related optical networking.
At the company’s pre-MWC 2025 media event, outgoing Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark emphasized four major themes for Nokia in Barcelona this week, all related to the service provider market:
–Cloudification, which is fundamental to the advancement of 5G Standalone. Nokia announced two related deals this week: One with Bell Canada to use Nokia’s AirScale portfolio in combination with a platform from Red Hat and Dell Technologies, to develop cloud and Open RAN capabilities. Additionally, Boost Mobile is using Nokia’s cloud-native 5G Voice Core, specifically Nokia’s Cloud Native Communication Suite or CNCS, which consolidates several IMS voice 3GPP functionalities into a single cloud-native network function (CNF).
Lundmark said that it’s true that the development and deployment of 5G Standalone cloud-native network cores has been slower than anticipated, but also said that it is accelerating. Nokia, he said, currently has more than 120 5G SA core deals globally. “But the reality is that most of them have not been deployed yet,” Lundmar said, adding that about 60 CSPs have deployed their 5G SA cores, and Nokia accounts for 35 of those.
–Automation, which Lundmark said is closely related to cloudification in that having cloud-native functions are a pre-requisite for efficient automation. He pointed to a recent study from STL Partners which found that average-sized operators could see $800 million annual in savings and additional revenues through the use of automation. “We believe that there is significant potential through first, making the network functions cloud-native, and then automating them to the full extent possible,” Lundmark added. He also folded AI under the umbrella of automation, as related to Nokia’s MWC demonstration of using generative AI to cut the creation time for network slices from days to minutes.
–Interoperability. “When every part of the network is interoperable, CSPs can buy from various vendors to create a network with the best performance [and] lowest total cost of ownership,” Lundmark said, emphasizing Nokia’s orchestration capabilities and calling Nokia “the only vendor with proven interoperability across all layers of the Radio Access Network.” Nokia, he noted, has been awarded more than 3,000 sites by German carrier Deutsche Telekom (DT) to support the operator’s Open RAN (O-RAN) network in Germany, which Lundmark called a “true multi-vendor O-RAN scale-up”.
–Monetization, including through the use of artificial intelligence, but also with tools like Nokia’s network as code platform. He said Nokia has over 50 customers using the platform, including some major global telecom operators, and pointed to the example of an API for SIM card swap and number verification, which are used as security solutions for banks and retail applications, as an opportunity for telcos to monetize.
While service providers account for 80% of Nokia’s business and Lundmark said that he expected them to remain the company’s most important customer group, the company is also pursuing adjacent strategic opportunities, including in supporting communications in the defense market and making significant investments in data center and IP networking.
In terms of the former: A deal between Nokia, Lockheed Martin and Verizon might not have been on anyone’s MWC bingo card, but it was one of the highlights of the company’s pre-show event on Sunday afternoon. Nokia’s military-grade 5G solutions have been integrated into Lockheed Martin’s 5G.MIL Hybrid Base Station (HBS) at Lockheed’s Experimental Network site in Orlando, Florida, where Verizon’s tech is already in use.
“The team will continue to refine and enhance technical offerings, including expanding hybrid network testing to include additional user device types, broader tactical communication system interoperability, and secure public-private network configurations,” Nokia and Lockheed Martin said in a joint release.
Nokia is also celebrating last week’s closing of its $2.3 billion deal to acquire Infinera, which is meant to strengthen its positioning in the optical and data center markets (particularly in North America) and help diversify Nokia’s customer base. Lundmark said that the Infinera acquisition “significantly increases our scale in optical networks and accelerates our innovation with webscalers, and strengthens our position in U.S., including in U.S. manufacturing.”
“Infinera’s acquisition will complement Nokia’s optical network and enable in further improving its capabilities across this technology. Furthermore, the combined capabilities of Nokia and Infinera are anticipated to improve the competitive positioning in optical networking solutions and the move also forms a part of Nokia’s growth strategy to strengthen its presence in North America,” commented Aurojyoti Bose, lead analyst at GlobalData, in a research note.
“Interestingly, Nokia’s decision to acquire companies while simultaneously selling certain assets seems like a strategic [maneuver] aimed at optimizing its business portfolio and enhancing its market position. This dual approach is primarily focused on strengthening its core business segments, particularly in Network Infrastructure and Optical Networks,” Bose concluded.
