- An Exact Ventures analyst said its AT&T win should help Nokia build a leading voice core position
- Dell'Oro said the Nokia contract will help AT&T enable 5G voice
- Voice is also being used for cellular generative AI apps now
What RAN snub? AT&T's erstwhile RAN partner Nokia has once again teamed with the operator, this time striking a multi-year extension of its voice core contract with Ma Bell.
Although users may generally think of data session management as the most important task on the core and consider voice calls old hat, Greg Collins, principal analyst at Exact Ventures, noted on LinkedIn that voice is now also being used as an important link for artificial intelligence (AI) applications on the cellular network.
“It is an increasingly important interface for GenAI services and agents,” Collins wrote.
Indeed, like many other mobile operators, AT&T is rolling out autonomous AI assistants and chatbots for many customer-facing applications on its network.
Market leader
Despite AT&T’s much-ballyhooed replacement of Nokia with Ericsson for the radio access network (RAN) portion of its network in December 2023, the Finnish vendor has – and will – continue to service its core network modernization contract with the operator. Analysts told Fierce that while the deal is one of many, it is poised to help Nokia lock in a leadership position in the voice arena.
“Nokia has two-thirds of the market for IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem] and VoLTE [Voice over LTE], and this will surely help them cement this position,” Collins stated.
The deal will see Nokia upgrading AT&T’s system “to a cloud-native IMS Core to handle 5G voice calls, a.k.a. 5G over New Radio (5G VoNR),” Dave Bolan, a Dell’Oro Group research director, told Fierce in an email. AT&T will join other leading MNOs (about 8 to 12) in providing 5G voice, the analyst added.
Why does any of this matter? Well, the AT&T win is a significant win for the RedHat-based Nokia Cloud platform “as AT&T seems to be moving on from Microsoft Azure which has divested most of its telco business,” Exact’s Collins explained.
Nokia and RedHat announced their 5G core partnership back in June 2023. In December 2024, Microsoft announced a deal to sell its Metaswitch assets – which it purchased to tackle the telco cloud market – to Alianza, though at the time Microsoft said it planned to continue supporting packet core products for customers.
With this deal in the bag for Nokia, we'll be watching to see how much longer Microsoft holds on in the telco arena.