The telecom industry's business environment is constantly transforming. As we move deeper into the 5G era and begin laying the groundwork for 6G, the expectations placed on mobile networks are again intensifying. Operators are under pressure to deliver a whole new range of tailored services and advanced use cases that require intelligent, adaptive and highly optimized networks.

So, how can we take our customers to 6G and beyond? It’s by leading the next wave of transformation with best-in-class products and software solutions that leverage advanced AI and automation. In fact, Nokia is at the forefront of this development with our autonomous network vision. It enables holistic, end-to-end intelligence in network management and operations across all network domains. 

I hope you had a chance to attend our Midsummer Launch event on 18 June. We discussed the radio access network (RAN) domain of the autonomous network vision and our latest additions to the comprehensive RAN portfolio. If you missed the event, I encourage you to watch the recording, which is now available. 

Let me recap the key highlights from our event, starting with how our portfolio is supporting operators as they evolve their networks, and concluding with how AI and automation will enable the next level of operational efficiency.

Unlocking new business with 5G evolution 

With our RAN portfolio, we are in a position of industry leadership and support our customers' business targets, whether they are in the early stages of 5G adoption or looking to capture opportunities with Advanced 5G. In fact, we work very closely with our customers in our product development. 

Let me give you an example. Many operators have chosen our Habrok Massive MIMO radios to deliver high performance and high capacity in metropolitan and urban centers. However, some customers want to harness the power of Habroks also in less crowded areas where they have a RAN sharing agreement with another operator. In practice, this translates into a requirement for more transmit power, and we are meeting this demand with our latest ultra-performance Habrok 32 and Habrok 64 radios for the n78 band.

Key capabilities of these new Massive MIMO radios include 400 W output power and 200 MHz occupied bandwidth (OBW) in the basic configuration, which is extendable to 300 MHz. This helps our customers allocate their spectrum resources more efficiently and optimize cell coverage also in shared network deployments beyond urban areas.

The new Habrok radios also support an intelligent software feature that we have developed: Dual Boost base station technology. It provides a significant leap in 5G Massive MIMO uplink and downlink processing and paves the way for Advanced 5G premium performance. 

As 5G adoption continues to scale, the focus on monetization grows. We provide our customers proven Advanced 5G solutions that help them generate new revenues today:

• RedCap, which allows operators to extend 5G to use cases with reduced bandwidth requirements and provides an evolution path for today’s IoT applications. It will further evolve to Enhanced RedCap (eRedCap), which will cater to a new wave of wearables and industrial IoT use cases.
• Dynamic Slicing, which enables guaranteed quality of service, performance, latency and availability for premium broadband services such as fixed wireless access, on-demand services, and other tailored use cases.
• Differentiated Services powered by technologies such as Low latency, low loss, scalable throughput (L4S) based on pioneering Bell Labs research. This enables immersive experiences and AI-driven industrial use cases. 

Now, let’s move on to AI and automation, which will fuel the next big transformation in radio networks.

Enabling next-level efficiency with advanced AI and automation

Those who embrace AI boldly and move fast will define the next era of telecom leadership. Today’s networks are complex and highly distributed, running technology from multiple suppliers and expanding across multiple network domains from RAN and transport to Core, fixed and optical networks. Automation brings unprecedented speed and precision to network operations in all these domains, significantly reducing the margin for manual errors and minimizing operational costs. Artificial intelligence further improves performance, provides real-time insights, and enables smarter service delivery. 

While some of our competitors have just started introducing their automation solutions, Nokia has entered the game much earlier. Our market-leading products with embedded AI and machine learning algorithms have been running in customer networks since 2019! And many of those are large-scale, multi-supplier environments with a high level of complexity.

Our customers can trust that we help them pave a clear evolution path to the future without unnecessary disruption. Our O-RAN compliant Service Management and Orchestration solution for the RAN domain, MantaRay SMO, enables advanced automation with deeply embedded AI. It builds on our field-proven MantaRay product family that is available and operational in many customer networks today, providing investment protection to our customers. 

The key components of our solution are:

• MantaRay NM for multi-supplier network management. It’s our common radio network management solution that supports purpose-built RAN and Cloud RAN, including data center hardware and cloud infrastructure, deployed by hundreds of customers. We are further enhancing it with O-RAN-compliant interfaces.
• MantaRay SON, our market-leading self-organizing networks solution, is already available for the application automation layer. Our major customers have been using it to optimize their large-scale multi-supplier networks for years. This platform evolves with O-RAN interfaces and rApps towards a multi-supplier non-real-time Radio Intelligent Controller (non-RT RIC) environment.
• MantaRay AutoPilot, our AI-powered, intent-based solution, which autonomously orchestrates the SON modules and rApps, is part of the application automation ecosystem.
• At the orchestration layer, we have the Digital Operations Center, which is also deployed across many customer networks globally. It also integrates a key functionality for our SMO, the RAN Slice Controller. It provides dynamic orchestration and resource management capabilities, so that each network slice meets specific service level agreements. 

Nokia is an active contributor to the TM Forum, an important industry alliance, and we have closely aligned our vision with its autonomous network framework and reference architecture. Already today, MantaRay SMO reaches level 4 of TM Forum’s framework, which means highly autonomous operations. This is only possible due to the advanced AI capabilities we have implemented, and it’s a unique differentiator compared to our competitors! 

The great advantage of MantaRay SMO is that it can run and orchestrate the existing network and automation solutions that our customers use today, while also supporting new interfaces and applications, such as standards-compliant rApps developed by Nokia and by our partners. Initially, our SMO comes with more than 30 rApps based on our exciting field-proven MantaRay SON modules. We will also provide an open ecosystem for customers and application developers with an extensive catalogue of rApps. 

There will be many use cases for rApps, such as enhancing throughput, optimizing energy efficiency while maintaining other KPIs at the customer-defined level, cell load balancing in congested areas, avoiding cell outages, and much more. Beyond enabling operational efficiency, AI is a catalyst for innovation, so we can expect to see many more exciting applications emerging from the ecosystem.

Building a future-proof foundation for our customers’ business

As the adoption of AI and automation is reshaping our industry, we will keep our relentless focus on building a future-proof technology foundation for our customers’ business. With our industry-leading solutions, we support their performance, automation and monetization goals. 

Read this article by Tommi Uitto, president of Mobile Networks, for more insights on how we redefine the future of networks.