Finnish vendor Nokia announced the availability of a software-based upgrade that will enable its 4G LTE radios to be migrated to 5G New Radio.
These features will provide immediate support for approximately one million radios, reaching 3.1 million by the end of the year and over 5 million in 2021, the vendor said in a release.
Nokia noted that it is helping to streamline the process of refarming LTE spectrum to 5G NR use by upgrading existing radio elements via software. The move will also support existing customers and the installed base by offering a seamless upgrade path to 5G/NR, the company added.
Network equipment competitor Ericsson last week announced the commercial availability of its 5G New Radio software, and Samsung recently touted a new v5G vRAN solution that will work with open RAN interfaces.
Nokia said that most of the 5G NR deployments to date have been performed with TDD centimeter wave and TDD millimeter wave deployment but also highlighted that the next big wave of 5G NR rollouts will be delivered by refarming existing FDD bands to 5G NR.
The ability to upgrade 4G LTE radios via a software update will significantly smooth out the deployment of 5G NR FDD, avoiding costly and disruptive site visits, Nokia said.
The European vendor said that it has a customer base of 359 4G LTE customers with deployed FDD RF units, most of which are possible to upgrade.
Nokia also said that it has Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) technology already in live networks, covering 2G/GSM-3G/WCDMA-4G/LTE and that it recently introduced DSS for 4GLTE-5G NR.
Nokia estimates that this new software solution will save the telecommunications industry potentially tens of billions of euros in site engineering and re-visit costs, because communication service providers will be able to upgrade their networks to 5G/NR on FDD with software.
“We already provide market- leading LTE radios to hundreds of customers around the world. This is an important solution because it will help our customers, quickly and efficiently upgrade their existing LTE radios so that they are 5G ready saving them time and money,” said Tommi Uitto, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia.
“While Open RAN promises software upgradability to ease transitions between ‘Gs’ and add new features, Nokia’s Flexi and AirScale portfolio shows it is ahead of the game by providing a software upgrade to transition over 5 million 4G radios to 5G,” said Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research. “Efficient FDD spectrum refarming is critical for fast, broad and deep 5G deployments. With Nokia supplying the majority of the world’s top 4G operators, supporting key advanced features such as DSS helps those operators lead with 5G.”
Nokia announced that it has reached a total of 74 commercial 5G contracts worldwide, of which 29 are live 5G networks.
The company said that some of the customers include AT&T, KDDI, Korea Telecom, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, O2, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Sprint, STC, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Vodafone Italy and Zain Saudi Arabia.
