5G Core

Evolve to the AI era with automation, resiliency and security

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Our 5G Standalone Core delivers clear business outcomes for telcos and enterprises. It reduces time to revenue with Core SaaS (for example), protects services through resilient design, and improves efficiency with full‑stack automation. The result is secure, reliable, high‑performance connectivity for subscribers, IoT devices, and emerging AI‑driven services.

How Nokia views the future of network automation

Learn more about how automation, AI, and human expertise are coming together to simplify network complexity and support the evolution toward autonomous networks. This Fierce Network interview explores the challenges operators face today and highlights practical approaches to building more resilient, efficient, and future-ready network environments.

What is the 5G core?

Our 5G Core delivers services to people, things, and now the emerging AI-driven services. The world is in the early years of the AI supercycle, where AI becomes pervasive, driving demand for connected intelligence.

Our 5G Core connects people, businesses and their devices to applications, services, and other networks, including the world’s telecom service providers and the Internet. Unlike 4G’s static core for relatively few services, 5G’s core is highly automated, embraces openness and is more secure for 5G’s wider variety of new services.

Our 5G Core enables your move to AI-driven services, 5G-Advanced and 6G.

Telecommunication providers use our 5G Core to rapidly create and deliver new applications and services, thereby improving profitability, thanks to new revenues, improved efficiencies and increased automation.

What are 5G core network functions?

The 5G SA Core network functions include authorizing service, establishing connectivity, managing mobility of people and their devices including roaming, identity management, analytics, network signaling, policy rules and enforcement, usage charging, and APIs for a global application ecosystem. Explore our 5G Core (5GC) network functions in the nearby graphic.

Our core network architecture is entirely cloud-native for 2G/3G, 4G and 5G (packet core, registers, shared data layer, policy, charging, signaling, analytics, network exposure, etc.) and IMS voice. This enables you to deploy your entire core networks using a common cloud infrastructure, thereby achieving improved performance, operational efficiency and security, instead of perpetuating vendor-specific siloed clouds. 

2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CSP 5G Core Network Infrastructure Solutions

 

Nokia is recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communication Service Provider 5G Core Network Infrastructure Solutions. Gartner also positioned Nokia as being furthest in Completeness of Vision. This is the fifth consecutive year* that Nokia has been positioned as a 5G Leader in a Gartner Magic Quadrant.
 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for CSP 5G Core Network Infrastructure Solutions, Peter Liu, Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, Kosei Takiishi, Enrique Hernandez-Valencia, 22 September 2025.

* 2021–23: Magic Quadrant for 5G Network Infrastructure for Communications Service Providers

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Image courtesy of Gartner. Magic Quadrant graphic disclaimer: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Nokia.

 

Read the full report

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Who are the leaders in 5G Core?


2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CSP 5G Core Network Infrastructure Solutions

Nokia was named a Leader and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision.
 

Gartner® Critical Capabilities for CSP 5G Core Network Infrastructure Solutions 2025

Nokia has the highest score for the report’s Public Cloud Deployment use case.
 

Omdia Market Landscape: Core Vendors 2025

Nokia was ranked #1 for portfolio competitiveness and ranked first in the following categories:

  • Cloud native readiness
  • Automation
  • Core as a service
  • Number of 5G Standalone Core deals
  • Core portfolio breadth


Téral Research: 5G SA Core, SDM, Policy & Charging 2025

Nokia commands 33% of the global commercial 5G SA footprint.
 

GlobalData 5G Mobile Core: Competitive Landscape Assessment 2025

Nokia was named a Leader.

How to earn profitable revenues with the 5G Core?


Our 5G Core solution enables Telcos’ delivery of ultra-reliable connectivity and low-latency performance. It is highly automated, which leads to Telcos saving time and improving operational efficiency.
 

We help Telcos and their customers fully benefit with 5G Standalone: 
 

  • Profit with services such as network slicing, enabling distinct services for enterprises or subscribers, while sharing the same underlying network.
  • Use our network APIs to create new applications and services.
  • Simplify the complexity introduced by 5G core network architecture’s disaggregation and distribution. Our core is geared for GitOps, AI/ML automation, efficient operations.
  • Scaling that improves energy efficiency.
  • Multi-cloud enable deployments anywhere, including the edge. Our Mobile Core and IMS Voice Core are cloud-native, in live commercial deployments on Red Hat (vertical or horizontal), VMware, AWS, Rakuten Cloud, Deutsche Telekom Horizontal Telco Cloud, etc.
  • Enhance security with the core’s designed-in security, including Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR).
  • Be confident with a core that delivers financial, operational and strategic benefits as described by our engineers.
resolving 5g's challanges

Introducing 5G-Advanced

Advanced 5G evolves 5G to its fullest capabilities, based on the latest specifications in 3GPP releases 18 and 19. This advanced version of 5G enhances performance for demanding applications and supports a wider range of use cases:

  • For things: 5G-Advanced offers high-accuracy positioning and timing services that enable applications such as drones and robotics to operate with precision in critical situations. It also supports RedCap’s massive low-power, long-life IoT services.
  • For connectivity: It includes features like network energy savings, radio optimizations for extended reality, enhanced slicing, and mobility improvements to coverage, radio performance, reliability, and shorter connection breaks.
  • For wide area enterprises: 5G-Advanced facilitates the modernization of railways, power utilities, and public safety systems.

We invite you to watch a discussion between Nokia’s Jitin Bhandari and O2 Telefónica’s Mallik Rao, part of the TechFive[G] interview series from the GSMA, while they assess 5G-Advanced’s value, use cases, enablers & timelines, and role of the ecosystem.

5G core how-to-guides

Why choose Nokia for 5G Standalone Core?

  • Our core is fully cloud-native, across 2/3G , 4G, 5G and IMS voice. It is the industry’s most widely-deployed core on multi-cloud, including Red Hat (vertical or horizontal), VMware, AWS, Google, Rakuten Cloud, Deutsche Telekom Horizontal Telco Cloud, etc.
  • Our 5G SA Core is in widespread live commercial service, with more deployments underway.
  • Our packet core’s Session Restoration Service (SRS) uniquely reduces over-provisioning, unnecessary signaling, and uses secondary database partitions rather than backup nodes.
  • Our packet core’s Appliances achieve high performance at the network’s edge and on enterprise premises.
  • Our Cloud Native Communication Suite (CNCS) simplifies IMS voice core’s deployment, integration, element management, lifecycle management, floorspace and power consumption, by packaging multiple IMS functions into a single Cloud-native Network Function (CNF).
  • Our Subscriber Data Management (SDM) is resilient, secure, and highly scalable. Its remarkable reliability is enabled by a resilient architecture, intelligent end-to-end prioritization, self-healing and a multi-site multi-master architecture.
  • Our Cloud Signaling Director is serving 3GPP Model D live commercial services with heightened efficiency, security and interoperability.
  • Our in-house agile rules engine (Cloud Signaling Director, Policy Controller & Convergent Charging) is incredibly fast, with rules evaluation times based in the 100 micro-second order of time.
  • Our Policy Controller uniquely enables three- and four-site geo-redundancy solutions. Sophisticated failover mechanisms ensure automatic traffic re-routing.
  • Our Convergent Charging uniquely supports charging beyond connectivity, by handling a wide range of services and applications in a fast and efficient manner. 

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