Nokia’s 5G Massive MIMO radio will soon be released
Nokia’s CEO says that the company will soon release its 5G Massive MIMO radio
Massive MIMO uses base stations that are equipped with arrays made up of a large number of antennas. This allows a larger number of users to connect to the network at the same time.
Nokia’s Lundmark said that not only will it be releasing its new Massive MIMO radio soon, some time during the current quarter, it will have wider bandwidth than a competitor’s model in addition to being lighter in high-volume configurations. The executive didn’t say which competitor he was talking about although Ericsson and Samsung each recently started talking about their new 5G Massive MIMO radios. Nokia’s CEO added, “This whole question of 5G radio competitiveness will be absolutely central to the overall competitiveness of our mobile network business.”
During today’s conference call, one analyst asked whether Nokia entertained any hopes of scoring a comeback with Verizon. The nation’s largest carrier gave a $6.6 billion 5G contract to Samsung instead of Nokia last year. The CEO said that the loss of Verizon’s business “started to be visible in Nokia’s quarterly results in the second half of last year, and that effect will continue to strengthen towards the end of the year.”
In response to the question about a comeback with Verizon, Lundmark said that Verizon is still one of Nokia’s three biggest customers and added that “We have really good business with them in other sectors, and we continue to work with them also in radio in addition to IP networks.” Moving along, Nokia’s CEO said that “You may have noticed that Verizon did list us as one of their radio partners at their capital markets day. There’s a lot of Nokia radio in their network. At the same time, it is a fact that we have not announced any large-scale 5G C-band radio deals with them.”
Nokia reported today that its first quarter 2021 sales rose 3% year-over-year to $6.18 billion from $5.94 billion. The growth, as minor as it was, came from its network infrastructure group. Revenue from the mobile unit declined by 4% on an annualized basis.
