The telecom industry is constantly transforming. Our customers are evolving their networks and business models towards an always-available service with consistent performance and the highest quality. In other words, wireless networks are becoming universal and programmable connectivity platforms instead of just high-capacity bit-pipes that aim to deliver best-effort mobile broadband services.

Naturally, a big part of this transformation is the adoption of 5G Standalone networks, which gives mobile network operators the opportunity to refarm spectrum resources from 4G to 5G. Another very important aspect is partnering with a telecom supplier that understands each customer's business drivers.

At Nokia, we are investing significantly to advance our R&D competencies and technology expertise. Our research arm, Nokia Bell Labs, powers the next generation of technology innovations. For our customers, the benefits are clear:

• Our networks deliver the highest efficiency and tailor-made performance, which is based on the key performance indicators (KPI) that each customer defines.

• We build products that help our customers unlock new monetization opportunities.

• We ensure that our customers’ networks are future-proof to best support their business strategies.

Read more about how we are helping our customers build a future-proof foundation for their business in this recent article by Tommi Uitto, Mobile Networks President at Nokia.

I hope you had a chance to attend our Midsummer Launch event on 19 June! Let me give you a recap of the radio access network (RAN) products and solutions we introduced.

Tailor-made performance with the highest network efficiency

This is the time of the year that many of us are looking forward to spending a lot more time outdoors. Whether your outdoor hobby is barbecuing, cycling, canoeing or something else, having the right equipment leads to better results.

In that spirit, we introduced powerful new additions to our AirScale baseband outdoor portfolio.

Tuuli 24 and Tuuli 26e are our next-generation compact outdoor baseband products.

We have seen very high customer demand for cost-efficient outdoor baseband solutions. Last year, we introduced the Tuuli 6 and Tuuli 12 and now, we added two next-generation variants to our portfolio.

Tuuli 24 supports ultra-capacity 4G and 5G, making it an optimal choice for network capacity and coverage deployments. And the star of our Midsummer Launch event was the Tuuli 26e. It provides our customers with a versatile choice for simple site modernization, as it also supports 2G or 3G in addition to 4G and 5G.

Some suppliers have stopped developing products that support 2G/3G, and there are other suppliers that have never had those capabilities. At Nokia, we know that our customers want to use all their spectrum assets optimally, and we remain committed to supporting all generations of radio access technologies with product variants in our portfolio.

These new baseband products support twice as much cell capacity while reducing power consumption by up to 40 percent. They also enhance uplink throughput by up to 30 percent, which is a major differentiator to enable new mobile services that depend more on uplink performance.

To further enhance deployment flexibility and scalability, as well as ensure support for long-term evolution, we have also added a new high-capacity zero-footprint sub rack solution to our AirScale baseband portfolio. It’s modular and combines up to three high/ultra capacity cards with one control card.

Our new AirScale baseband products are Open RAN compliant and our customers can trust that investments made in our RAN portfolio are future-proof.

We also announced the high-performance Habrok 32 Massive MIMO radio.

The high-performance Habrok 32 is a compact, energy-efficient Massive MIMO radio that supports an instantaneous bandwidth of 200MHz. This makes it ideal for many deployment scenarios, especially when spectrum allocations are not fragmented. Initially, the Habrok 32 supports the 3.5GHz band, which makes it a great fit for the mass 5G rollouts that are continuing in many countries.

We now have high-performance and ultra-performance Habrok options for both 32TRX and 64TRX. This means our customers can choose the ideal Massive MIMO solution that best fits their available spectrum assets and deployment needs. 

All our baseband products and Habrok Massive MIMO radios use the latest versions of our industry-leading ReefShark System-on-Chip (SoC) technology to perfectly balance performance and energy efficiency.

Check out our AirScale Radio Access webpage for more details on our RAN portfolio and the new capabilities.

An evolution path to 5G-Advanced and beyond enhanced with artificial intelligence

Our 5G products have placed us in a position of industry leadership. Our next-generation baseband products are ready for the arrival of more artificial intelligence capabilities in radio access networks and support an evolution path to 5G-Advanced and, ultimately, 6G.

Based on feedback from our customers, we are already leading the industry by leveraging artificial intelligence in our service capabilities. The best part is that everything is available and tested in commercial networks, not just empty talk about future possibilities.

Let me recap the latest AI-based additions to our service offering. We have developed the industry’s first purpose-built, conversational AI chatbot designed to assist care engineers: the Nokia AI Digital Assistant. It's based on the Nokia Large Language Model developed by Nokia Bell Labs and language models from OpenAI.

Some of our customers are already widely using the Nokia AI Digital Assistant to improve the efficiency of their care operations. The new release of this platform has been trained with a large collection of telecom-specific technical documentation. It's also trained to understand images and retrieve information from them. It can understand and reply to much more complex queries than the previous versions. You could say that it’s designed by mind mapping the thought process of a telecoms engineer, something that a chatbot aimed at the generic audience is not able to replicate.

Another AI-based enhancement in our service portfolio is a new augmented reality application that we provide to deployment engineers and partners: the Hazard Detection Lens.

The augmented reality capabilities of the Hazard Recognition Lens make it easier for the field crew working at deployment sites to identify hazards and ensure compliance with regulations and Nokia’s life-saving rules. This easy-to-use mobile application is one of the tools we have developed to achieve our goal of zero incidents in network deployments. Everyone who comes to work in the morning should return home safely!

Read more about how we leverage artificial intelligence in our services on the Services for mobile networks webpage.

Optimized small-scale RAN solutions for enterprises

When you consider the typical enterprise 5G networks, they are and will remain significantly smaller than communications service provider (CSP) networks. Enterprise customers are looking for solutions that scale down to small deployments, helping them optimize the total cost of ownership.

At our Midsummer Launch, we introduced our innovative All-in-One 5G small cells for indoor and outdoor use cases: the Kolibri family. “Kolibri” is the Finnish word for the smallest adult bird in the world, the hummingbird, which has similar characteristics to our compact and agile All-in-One products. Kolibri combines baseband and RF into a single unit, which enables simple plug-and-play installation and deployment flexibility both indoors and outdoors.

Several leading analyst companies predict that the demand for small cells will grow in the coming years. Our Kolibri solution enables cost-efficient, small-scale deployments consisting of just a handful of access points, a perfect fit to fulfill the requirements of industrial and office environments. It is also an optimal choice for complementing the macro coverage and densifying CSP networks in high traffic areas.

Visit the Nokia small cells webpage for more information on our comprehensive small cell portfolio, including Kolibri solutions.

Let me conclude by introducing MantaRay Network Management (NM) XS. It’s the new software-only version of MantaRay NM, our unified network management solution with over 500 active customers worldwide. MantaRay NM XS scales down to meet the requirements of enterprise networks, and you can run it on diverse hardware platforms. It’s part of the flexible Nokia anyRAN approach for enterprises, which brings the widest choice of strategic options for our customers through collaboration with leading technology partners, system integrators and cloud core solution providers.

You can find more information on the MantaRay NM webpage.

With these latest product and service innovations, we help our CSP and enterprise customers build a future-proof foundation for their business.

I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback on our products and solutions.