- T-Mobile’s chief network officer reiterated T-Mobile’s support for Nokia
- Nokia is part of T-Mobile’s efforts to study AI-RAN at its innovation center in Bellevue, Washington
- The analyst who predicted T-Mobile would drop Nokia is waiting to see how incoming Nokia CEO Justin Hotard treats mobile operators
T-Mobile isn’t exactly shouting from the rooftops about the advantages of open RAN, but it’s certainly supportive of the idea.
That was evident during a fireside chat with T-Mobile SVP and Chief Network Officer Ankur Kapoor during this week’s Fierce Network event, Exploring Revenue Streams with 5G Networking (free registration required).
In fact, T-Mobile believes the entire industry is headed toward open RAN. It’s just that T-Mobile, characteristically, is taking a different track – one that involves AI, according to Kapoor.
“We are fully behind open RAN. We think we can actually supercharge that with bringing in some AI functionalities into that concept and that's kind of what our path is,” he said.
With open RAN, “I think it really kind of comes down to the interfaces. We believe that AI RAN, which is actually very open – it happens to have the same interfaces – and enabled and super-fused with AI actually is the future of open RAN, or AI RAN, whichever way we want to look at it.”
His comments echo those made during an interview earlier this month at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, where he mentioned – without saying AT&T’s name out loud – how a rival announced an open RAN deal where the same vendor (Ericsson) is being used end to end. That kind of goes against the whole point of open RAN – the ability for operators to mix and match products from different RAN vendors.
Let’s hear it for Nokia
Kapoor also provided another vote of confidence in its two-vendor strategy and its choice of Nokia. Last fall, it was rumored that T-Mobile might ditch Nokia in favor of a network entirely supplied by Ericsson. So far, that hasn’t happened.
T-Mobile is pretty much split 50-50 across the nation with Ericsson and Nokia infrastructure gear. Ericsson is the dominant vendor along the coasts and Nokia is prevalent in the middle of the country. That configuration wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, but it ended up that way after a series of mergers and acquisitions over the years, according to Kapoor.
“We are pretty happy with the performance that we're getting from both Ericsson and Nokia. They're bringing in all the research facilities back into the United States, giving us the ability to launch new features ahead of competition,” he said.
At Nokia’s pre-MWC event in Barcelona, T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson took the stage to hammer home the importance of Nokia in T-Mobile’s network. Ewaldsson said Nokia is “absolutely essential” in T-Mobile’s move to a cloud-native infrastructure.
The trigger behind the report about T-Mobile potentially dumping Nokia came from longtime industry analyst and EJL Wireless Research President Earl Lum, who chronicled his thesis in a LinkedIn post. Lum is the analyst who accurately predicted that Nokia would lose its AT&T business to Ericsson.
With T-Mobile, he cited technical issues, mainly the inclusion of unwieldly fans on Nokia’s Massive MIMO radios. (Nokia denied such problems and said Lum’s comments were mainly directed at old 5G products designed in 2018.) If Nokia were to lose T-Mobile, that would make it strike three for the Finnish vendor in the U.S., since it already lost that key business with AT&T and previously, Verizon.
Nokia’s new boss needs to step up
At MWC earlier this month, Lum followed up on LinkedIn saying he didn’t see any fan units attached to Nokia’s Massive MIMO radios on display at its booth. That’s a positive move on Nokia’s part, he told Fierce this week, but the jury is still out on Nokia’s status in the wireless world until he sees what incoming CEO Justin Hotard does when he takes the helm on April 1.
Hotard’s most recent job was head of Intel’s Data Center and AI group. Nokia has been saying it wants to chase growth in the data center market, shifting away from the telecom market, so if the new CEO doesn’t start showing some love toward mobile operators, that will speak volumes, according to Lum.
Referring to Hotard, “my biggest issue is: Do I believe that you're doing what's in my best interest as a mobile operator when you start driving the car at Nokia … Within that first 30 days, if I don't hear about mobile enough, that tells me what your strategy is,” he said.
“T-Mobile is probably happy they fixed the fan, but are they going to be happy if Justin doesn’t start saying: ‘I’m here for you,’” Lum surmised.
T-Mobile and its AI RAN ambitions
T-Mobile is a founding member of the AI-RAN Alliance that launched a year ago at MWC, led by SoftBank and Nvidia. Nokia and Ericsson also are founding members and they’re both involved in T-Mobile’s work with Nvidia at AI-RAN Innovation Center in Bellevue, Washington.
Others in the global wireless industry are approaching AI and the RAN in different ways, but that’s the direction most everyone is headed.
Dan Hays, strategy and policy consulting leader at PwC, said AI in the network is “clearly going to be a key direction for the future,” but it's unlikely to create enough value to cause immediate major upgrades.
“No one's going to do a rip and replace just so that they can get AI RAN,” he told Fierce, noting that AI RAN is most likely going to be an element in the next generation network overlay. “I think it’s highly likely that AI RAN could become either an element of the 6G upgrade cycle whenever it happens, or it could, quite frankly, almost become synonymous.”
That’s what Nvidia is working toward, but exactly where the GPUs end up is to be determined.
Kapoor briefly addressed that in the interview with Fierce at MWC. “Everybody's going have their perspective on it and I'm not saying that you absolutely need GPUs on the base stations. It's really going to come down to the economics, right? In today’s world, GPUs are still pretty expensive and you could argue that lots of use cases do not require the GPUs to be right next to the customer,” Kapoor said.
“I also think that technology will evolve,” he concluded. “This is like any new thing that gets launched. Eventually you get lots of advancement and you start getting that scale and the economies.”