Nokia

After two years of decline, telecom equipment spending is edging back into positive territory with early signs of a broad-based rebound. Dell’Oro Group’s preliminary data indicates worldwide telecom equipment revenues across six tracked sectors rose 4% year over year in the first half of 2025, with markets outside China up a stronger 8%. The rebound was not limited to a single pocket of spend, but three areas led the gains: mobile core networks, optical transport, and service provider routers and switches. By contrast, RAN remains comparatively muted in many markets as 5G macro buildouts mature.
Nokia and du completed a production-style trial that applied classical and generative AI to accelerate optical network planning and day-to-day operations. The partners tested Nokia’s WaveSuite AI, an automation assistant that exposes network intelligence through a natural-language interface. du cited faster troubleshooting, fewer errors in routine changes, and better resource utilization. The operator also reported concrete planning gains: roughly half the time to develop optical plans and about 30% greater efficiency in network designs, which translates to less overbuild and faster time-to-market. The net effect is improved service delivery and a smoother experience for operations teams tasked with meeting strict SLAs.
AT&T has gone live on Boldyn Networks’ neutral-host infrastructure in New York’s Joralemon Street tunnel, with G line tunnel segments next in the rollout. AT&T customers can now access 5G mobile service through the 1.1-mile (1.8 km) Joralemon Street tunnel, the oldest underwater subway tunnel in New York City, which links the 4/5 lines between Borough Hall in Brooklyn and Bowling Green in Manhattan. Subway connectivity has shifted from convenience to critical infrastructure for safety, accessibility, and productivity. AT&T’s first-mover status sets a competitive benchmark; other national carriers (Verizon and T‑Mobile) are expected to follow as on-boarding progresses across the system.
Nokia has introduced a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) digital twin and AI-powered applications inside its Altiplano platform to give operators a unified view of active and passive assets and to improve reliability with faster, first-time fixes. The core launch centers on creating a digital twin of the FTTH network that stitches together live data from active elements (OLT/ONT, IP edge, customer premises equipment) with outside-plant passive infrastructure (ducts, cables, splitters) maintained in inventory and geospatial systems. Together, these tools target the highest-impact operational pain points: early anomaly detection, automated topology audits, faster root cause analysis, and improved first-time fix rates.
The Department of Defense and the National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) are moving five industry-academia teams into field demonstrations to validate dynamic spectrum coexistence between defense systems and commercial networks. The focus is practical: prove that military radar, weapons systems, and electronic sensors can operate alongside commercial 5G/6G-class networks in the same bands without harmful interference. Experiments are slated to begin as early as November, with results feeding a follow-on study on dynamic spectrum operations mandated by the 2023 National Spectrum Strategy.
Nokia and Boldyn Networks have launched a private 5G network at Callio FutureMINE in Finland, addressing underground mining’s toughest connectivity issues. The network supports autonomous vehicles, real-time visualization, and tele-remote operations, transforming safety, efficiency, and sustainability in mining. This deployment sets a global benchmark for industrial 5G use in extreme environments.
Fresh off its merger, VodafoneThree has locked in eight-year vendor deals with Ericsson and Nokia to underpin a £11 billion UK network build that is front-loaded for rapid 5G Standalone coverage gains. VodafoneThree selected Ericsson and Nokia as primary technology partners for one of the largest privately funded mobile infrastructure programs in Europe, with contracts collectively valued at over £2 billion. In year one, close to three quarters of the population are targeted for access to its fastest 5G services, rising to about 90% population coverage on 5G Standalone by year three and reaching roughly 99.95% by 2034 under a regulated, fully funded build plan.
Verizon has launched a 6G Innovation Forum to accelerate research, trials, and standards alignment for the next generation of wireless. The forum convenes major RAN suppliers, including Ericsson, Samsung Electronics, and Nokia – alongside platform and device ecosystem players such as Meta and Qualcomm Technologies. The stated goal is an open, diversified, and resilient 6G ecosystem with global alignment from the outset. Verizon will back the forum with hands-on environments, starting with a dedicated 6G Lab in Los Angeles. Early priorities include testing new spectrum bands and bandwidths, and validating interoperability with mainstream standards bodies.
Campus AI is moving from pilots to production, and the bottlenecks are increasingly in the wired and wireless underlay that must feed models, sensors, and edge compute reliably and efficiently. Huawei’s F5G-A FTTO (Fiber-to-the-Office) push aligns with this shift: fiber as the default access medium, symmetrical bandwidth for uplink-heavy AI flows, and deterministic performance for time-sensitive applications in healthcare, education, hospitality, and manufacturing. With 50 Gbps to rooms and 10 Gbps to Wi‑Fi APs, the design targets uplink-intensive workloads—think whole-slide imaging uploads, multi-stream 4K conferencing, and XR labs—while lowering latency and jitter compared with legacy copper tiers.
Gartner’s latest outlook points to global AI spend hitting roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025 and exceeding $2 trillion in 2026, signaling a multi-year investment cycle that will reshape infrastructure, devices, and networks. This is not a short-lived hype curve; it is a capital plan. Hyperscalers are pouring money into data centers built around AI-optimized servers and accelerators, while device makers push on-device AI into smartphones and PCs at scale. For telecom and enterprise IT leaders, the message is clear: capacity, latency, and data gravity will dictate where value lands. Spending is broad-based. AI services and software are growing fast, but the heavy lift is in hardware and cloud infrastructure.
Nokia and Deutsche Bahn have activated a commercial-grade 5G Standalone network on the 1900 MHz band to validate Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) operations on live tracks. The partners have launched a 5G SA deployment using the 1900 MHz (n101) spectrum band on DB’s digital railway test field in the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge), Germany. The network is built with Nokia AirScale radio equipment and an optimized, cloud-native 5G core, and it operates on moving trains on outdoor tracks. The setup includes built-in failover, self-healing, and real-time monitoring to sustain service continuity in mission-critical environments.
The quarter’s growth underscores a resilient access capex cycle despite macro uncertainty, with fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) deployments offsetting sluggish cable spend. Fiber PON platforms and 5G FWA customer premises equipment (CPE) drove the uptick, while DOCSIS infrastructure outlays fell 13% year over year on weaker Remote PHY Device (RPD) purchases and a slowdown in new virtual CMTS (vCMTS) licenses. The competitive center of gravity in broadband is shifting. Operators prioritizing XGS-PON rollouts and 5G FWA are growing faster and spending more, while cable operators are pacing upgrades and deferring some distributed access architecture (DAA) investments.

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