By Catherine Sbeglia
Following “months of joint testing,” Nokia and Dish Network have entered an agreement in which Nokia’s cloud-native, standalone 5G Core software products will provide support in a number of areas including data management, device management and integration services.
Dish, historically a satellite TV provider, has been focused on building out a 5G network in the US by 2023 and is working with Fujitsu, Nvidia, Altiostar and Mavenir to supply various parts of the in-progress network. This deal marks the first of its kind for Dish, in the sense that Nokia is the only traditional telecommunications vendor chosen by the provider so far.
Nokia is a strong supporter of Open RAN, making the company a good partner for Dish who is intent on using its wireless spectrum portfolio worth US$20 billion to build an open network that uses software to run network functions in the cloud.
Dish chief network officer, Marc Rouanne commented more explicitly on the company’s vision for its network: “This is an important step in bringing to life Dish’s plans to deliver the first open, agile, virtualized 5G network in the US Nokia’s new release is cloud-native, standalone and ready for full automation, providing Dish the software capabilities required to deliver thousands of network slices with low latency and SLA on demand.”
President of Nokia Software and Nokia chief digital officer Bhaskar Gorti said that Nokia’s product will deliver near-zero-touch automation capabilities, high-level operational efficiencies, scale and performance.
Further, also as part of the deal, Nokia will deliver additional cloud-native products that will provide 4G, 5G standalone and Voice over Wi-Fi access to core network functions.
According to Nokia, 25 of the top 40 communication service providers in the world rely on Nokia Core network products.
