New Delhi: Finnish company Nokia on Thursday announced it has signed 63 commercial 5G contracts worldwide, positioning it as a global leader in the delivery of end-to-end 5G solutions.
The client list includes customers such as AT&T, Korea Telecom, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Sprint, STC, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Vodafone Italy and Zain Saudi from the key 5G early adopter and progressive markets.
"This milestone highlights the quality and customer confidence in our 5G portfolio and we expect this to continue this year with the addition of many more new deals," Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said in a statement.
The 63 signed commercial contracts exclude any other type of 5G agreements, such as paid network trials, pilots or demonstrations. If such agreements were to be included, the total number of 5G agreements would reach over 100, said the company.
"Our global end-to-end portfolio includes products and services for every part of a network, which are helping network operators to enable key 5G capabilities such as network slicing, distributed cloud and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT)," Uitto elaborated.
Nokia have more than 350 customers in 4G and the first 63 5G customers represent some two thirds of its global Radio Access Networks business in a typical year.
"Further, these 63 contracts -- across low bands, middle bands and high bands, and across traditional and cloud network architectures -- provide us with invaluable early experiences and insights for the benefit of the rest of the world. So, it is a great start", the Nokia executive said.
Nokia has globally available end-to-end product portfolio that covers all 5G network elements, including radio, core, cloud and transport as well as management, automation and security.
Approximately 60 per cent of Nokia's 5G customers select more than just New Radio from its end-to-end portfolio.
The company declared more than 2 000 5G patent families as essential for 5G, a year after making its first declarations for the standard.
