Nokia reaches 63 5G contracts surpassing Huawei 

Finnish supplier Nokia revealed in January 2020 that it has gotten to a total amount of 63 commercial 5G contracts worldwide.

The company said that some of the clients consist of AT&T, KDDI, Korea Telecommunications, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, O2, SK Telecommunications, SoftBank, Sprint, STC, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Vodafone Italy and Zain Saudi Arabia.

“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,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia. “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. We are delighted that our technologies are helping to shape the delivery and deployment of 5G technologies worldwide and the myriad benefits these will bring to businesses and consumers alike.”

Nokia highlighted that these 63 authorized industrial contracts exclude any other kind of 5G agreements, such as paid network tests, pilots or trials. If we include these arrangements, the complete variety of 5G contracts would certainly get to over 100.

“Nokia is the only network supplier whose 5G technology has been contracted by all four nationwide operators in the U.S., all three operators in South Korea and all three nationwide operators in Japan,” Uitto stated. “We have more than 350 consumers in 4G, but these initial 63 customers represent some two thirds of our global Radio Accessibility Networks service in a typical year. Additionally, these 63 contracts– across one of the most important markets, using low, middle and high bands, , and throughout traditional and also cloud network architectures — offer us with indispensable very early experiences as well as insights for the benefit of the rest of the world. So, it is a great start,” he said.

Rival supplier Ericsson currently has 78 commercial 5G contracts, of which 24 are live networks.

Also, Huawei stated in November 2019 that it had reached 50 5G contracts internationally.