All of the AirScale RAN gear announced today is using chipsets, or SoCs, from Nokia’s ReefShark portfolio, including new CPUs and GPUs, a Nokia spokesperson told SDxCentral.
“We continue to execute on the plan we announced earlier this year to increase the utilization of ReefShark SoCs in our portfolio. This announcement is another step in this direction,” the spokesperson said.
Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group, noted that Nokia’s cost reduction efforts, driven by its migration from field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to ASICs, has already been taking place in the background. 5G equipment running on Nokia’s ReefShark SoCs comprised about 10% of its 5G shipments in Q4 2019, he explained.
Nokia’s commercial launch of DSS, which the vendor expects to begin delivering this month followed by volume shipments by July, is another important development for the company. The vendor is running a little more than a month behind Ericsson in delivering DSS, but Pongratz doesn’t expect that timing to negatively impact Nokia.
DSS is expected to pick up during the second half of this year, he said. “Given that a good portion of the DSS business case is hinging on the ability to reuse existing infrastructure, it can be implied there is some wiggle room in the timing for this upgrade.”
Nokia’s DSS software is compatible with 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G network technologies, according to the vendor. The company previously said it doesn’t expect the technology to deliver meaningful performance gains on 5G standalone (SA) networks until 2021. Moreover, it claims a more differentiated approach to DSS because it supplies previous generation cellular networks. Ericsson’s DSS software, for example, only supports 4G and 5G.
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Nokia’s DSS release is a positive development, according to Pongratz. It and the radio portfolio expansion are required to ensure a competitive offering and those moves are “consistent with Nokia’s strategy to be well positioned in this ongoing transition from proprietary to virtualized RAN,” he said.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/nokia-expands-ran-portfolio-releases-dss/2020/04/?hit=8baffe13-b4c8-4551-8612-1f727d8757ec