Nokia’s confirmation as Tampnet’s RAN supplier for a major offshore 5G build-out begs questions about the vendor’s future private 5G strategy – just as staff across Europe protest its restructuring plans, which includes the sale of its private 5G unit.
Old news, new tensions – Nokia’s Tampnet deal recycles old news, but arrives amid discontent about restructuring, EU job cuts, and Nokia’s perceived westwards migration.
Dilemma for ‘new Nokia’ – it illustrates a pivot to box-shifting RAN sales over complex service deals; it raises questions about how its old ECE and new MI units will coexist.
EU telecoms petition – telecoms staff in Europe have started a petition against the perceived ‘Americanisation’ of Nokia, and also Ericsson; 500 signatures, and counting.
Norway-based private-networks specialist Tampnet – covered in these pages for five years at least, since way before the rest of the mainstream telecoms trade press decided that private cellular was worth covering – has confirmed Nokia as its RAN partner for offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Nokia equipment will be paired with core network software from US-based Mavenir. So is this what the future of private 5G looks like for Nokia – easy box sales for rapid returns, versus integrated solutions on escalating service deals?
It is an open question, doing the rounds online following a press note from Nokia yesterday (December 2) – which, effectively, recycled old news. Tampnet’s tie-up with Mavenir was picked up by RCR Wireless back in July; Nokia’s involvement on the RAN side, as part of a cut-and-shut twin-play with Mavenir (which also saw Ericsson ousted from the mix), was put right (rather triumphantly) in other media. The point is, it is yesterday’s news, confirmed by Nokia following some tumult about its move to sell its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) division, plus others.
The ECE decision, of course, attended the announcement of the firm’s structural reorganisation at its Capital Markets Day on November 19, bookended by headcount reductions in Europe and financial investments in the US. It should be noted that Nokia has responded to the criticism, and explained its decisions in terms of its stated AI growth strategy and its global R&D status. But the fall-out will rumble on; an open petition to “save EU telecoms, networks, and AI know-how” (“before it’s gone”) has gained 500 signatures since it went live last week (December 26).
It cites the creeping Americanisation of both Nokia and Ericsson; the comments are worth reading, signed by telecoms industry staff (whether from Nokia, Ericsson, or elsewhere) in France and Germany, clearly, but also from across Europe – including Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. It won’t do much, surely, but it illustrates the ill-feeling within the ranks at Nokia, and existential concerns in the EU. Anecdotally, Nokia staff from the UK (on top of EU-based staff), and also South Korea, have since been in touch with RCR Wireless to give their view on proceedings.
Meanwhile, the Finnish firm’s private 5G deal with Tampnet – based purely on sales of 5G AirScale radios – is sizeable, as discussed previously: beyond just the Gulf of Mexico, Tampnet will swap-out existing gear for a new Nokia/Mavenir combo across its entire offshore footprint of “120 active base stations”; it will also “extend coverage” to 350-400 platforms, rigs, floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) units, wind farms, and other vessels. No question, it is a large-scale private 5G project, of the sort that Tampnet has nailed down.
Tampnet, headquartered in Stavanger, has already deployed private 4G / 5G for oil and energy customers at 350-odd other rigs and vessels in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of Trinidad & Tobago and Canada. It holds spectrum for private offshore cellular deployments at 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 2.6 GHz, and owns North Sea fibre cable as well. In March, it signed a deal to supply fibre connectivity and services for the offshore Trion Project in the Gulf of Mexico – where the Nokia announcement focuses.
The Trion Project is a joint venture for oil production between Woodside Petróleo Operaciones de México and PEMEX Exploración y Producción, in operator and non-operator roles. It is Tampnet’s first “entry into Mexican waters”, it noted, and sees it extend around 1,500 kilometres of subsea fibre in the deepwater region of the Gulf of Mexico with a further 200 kilometres of subsea cable. In July, Tampnet announced a deal with Norwegian oil exploration firm Aker BP to install private 5G on the Edvard Grieg oil field on the Norwegian continental shelf.
Italian defence firm Leonardo is also involved; the project will extend to six further platforms (Yggdrasil, Fenris, Valhall, Alvheim, Ivar Aasen, and Skarv), across the North Sea and Norwegian Sea. In August, a deal to deliver private 5G from Nokia (and HPE/Athonet; plus LEO back-haul with Starlink and OneWeb), for offshore contractor Island Drilling. It is also working with Norwegian oil and gas company Vår Energi to provide edge-based 4G/5G and compute services to a FPSO unit called Jotun, located in the Balder oil field in the North Sea.
All which says Tampnet is a serious player in offshore networks; all of which we know already, if we have been reading RCR Wireless for the last five years. So what of this deal with Nokia, to extend their North Sea efforts to the Gulf of Mexico? Arnt Erling Skavdal, chief technology officer for mobile technology at Tampnet, said: “This investment will enable us to meet the evolving connectivity and automation needs of offshore industries, enhance worker safety and unlock new digital applications that were not possible before.”
Jeff Pittman, head of ‘North America enterprise’ in Nokia’s mobile networks division (about to be absorbed into its ‘mobile infrastructure’ unit), talked about digital change in “some of the world’s most challenging environments”. But what does it say of the new Nokia, and its position on private 5G? Well, it is useful business, clearly, but, as stated at the top, it is also a RAN-only project, which places Nokia into a ‘Frankenstein’ integration with a third-party core provider – as US start-up Celona likes to say to distinguish itself from most other non-Nokia vendors in the market.
It also hands all of the service upside to someone else. Of course, Nokia has always done these RAN deals; its radios are considered to be excellent. Many of its earliest projects in the ‘campus’ sector paired them with an Athonet (HPE) core network. Also, much of the heavy lifting with systems integration goes to… well, system integrators, with which Nokia’s ECE division has developed close relationships. But as someone at Nokia said to RCR Wireless: “It is only a RAN deal, and Nokia could do more work and get three-to-five times the revenue with a managed service contract. The new Nokia wants pennies in its pocket – rather than the bigger deal, higher profit, recurring income.”
Of course, a spun-off ECE division will find its proposition is complicated, potentially, by its separation from Nokia – as a Frankenstein solution, nominally, without the big-brand reputation (‘Nokia won’t just vanish’; ‘no one got fired for buying Nokia’) that it has enjoyed until now – that is, unless a spun-off ECE business gets a decent RAN reseller agreement with the new ‘mobile infrastructure’ division. (Both parties would have interests, here: ECE would be able to push ahead with its old RAN knowhow, and Nokia would get a well-oiled path to a 50-odd percent share of the fast-growing industrial 5G campus market.)
Anyway; lots of questions, still. We will follow this story as it develops.
