Pitkä juttu Iain Morrikselta, johon haastatellut Uittoa. Ja mitä tähän asti olen lukenut, olen hämmästynyt… jutun viesti on ollut yllättävän myönteistä.
Nokia has not dumped Intel, and Uitto, who tactfully avoids naming it as a source of difficulties, says “the first SoC partner has improved a lot.”
He extinguished risk by introducing two other suppliers – Broadcom mainly for radiofrequency expertise, and Marvell on the baseband. With Intel contributing in both areas, Nokia has alternatives it previously lacked.
Even so, the recent naming of partners makes Nokia sound more reliant on outsiders than Ericsson, which attributes SoC success entirely to its Ericsson Silicon chips division.
Uitto denies that is the case, indicating that only Huawei does everything in-house apart from manufacturing, which has previously been outsourced to TSMC, a Taiwanese foundry now cut off from it by US sanctions.
Delays at Intel were not entirely to blame for Nokia’s problems, Uitto admits. It underinvested at the beginning of the 5G cycle and misjudged the direction of travel when the standard was still in flux.
The introduction of SoC-based platforms throughout the 5G portfolio is the final stage of the turnaround, in his view. An improvement in profitability is not the only encouraging sign, either.
Nokia’s field performance is also far better than it was. In South Korea, arguably the world’s most advanced 5G market, it clearly lagged its rivals on downlink and uplink speeds when services were launched last April. But the gap has been shrinking and should vanish entirely this year, says Uitto.
Outside that market, feedback from major customers such as Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone has been positive, he insists.
In addition, it has been trumpeting its recent competitiveness on power consumption as FPGAs have been ditched. “We have all along been ahead of our competition on 4G power consumption and we were behind in 5G because we had fully FPGA-based products,” says Uitto.
Massive MIMO tests carried out by one European operator scored Nokia well ahead of rivals, he tells Light Reading. “It is a SoC-based product, so we have come a long way.”
“We believe there is more to gain than to lose,” says Uitto. “It is not like open RAN will happen or not. The only question is how fast and to what extent. When it happens, it is better to have been part of defining it, contributing to it and making sure your platforms are suitable and your SoCs support open RAN specifications.”
But a positive signal has come from Deutsche Telekom, the huge German operator that soured on Nokia back in 2017, when it began switching to Ericsson in its domestic market. In December, it revealed plans to build an “open RAN town” in Neubrandenburg this year, calling out Nokia as a “strong European partner for our cooperation.” Big things have small beginnings.