Nokia today revealed a series of new radios for 5G networks and released dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) software that will work on existing and new hardware. 

The vendor’s second-generation radio access network (RAN) gear is part of the company’s push to lower costs and boost performance with a new system-on-a-chip (SoC). Nokia’s initial 5G equipment carried high costs that have impacted its profit margin and caused various challenges for the company. 

The company previously said the new hardware would comprise 35% of 5G shipments by the end of 2020, 70% by the end of 2021, and all 5G products it delivers by the end of 2022. 

Nokia’s AirScale portfolio now includes dual and triple-band remote radio heads, and several massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas for 5G. It claims the gear will increase capacity and lower the total cost of ownership.

The Finnish vendor also introduced an AirScale All-in-Cloud base station that virtualizes the baseband and moves processing power to the edge of the network to deliver lower latency. Nokia Bell Labs is also demonstrating an AirScale cloud-native RAN that adheres to cloud-native principles and allows operators to deploy RAN as a service-based architecture, according to the vendor.

All of the AirScale RAN gear announced today is using chipsets, or SoCs, from Nokia’s ReefShark portfolio, including new CPUs and GPUs, a Nokia spokesperson told SDxCentral.

“We continue to execute on the plan we announced earlier this year to increase the utilization of ReefShark SoCs in our portfolio. This announcement is another step in this direction,” the spokesperson said. 

Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group, noted that Nokia’s cost reduction efforts, driven by its migration from field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to ASICs, has already been taking place in the background. 5G equipment running on Nokia’s ReefShark SoCs comprised about 10% of its 5G shipments in Q4 2019, he explained. 

Nokia’s commercial launch of DSS, which the vendor expects to begin delivering this month followed by volume shipments by July, is another important development for the company. The vendor is running a little more than a month behind Ericsson in delivering DSS, but Pongratz doesn’t expect that timing to negatively impact Nokia.

DSS is expected to pick up during the second half of this year, he said. “Given that a good portion of the DSS business case is hinging on the ability to reuse existing infrastructure, it can be implied there is some wiggle room in the timing for this upgrade.”

Nokia’s DSS software is compatible with 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G network technologies, according to the vendor. The company previously said it doesn’t expect the technology to deliver meaningful performance gains on 5G standalone (SA) networks until 2021. Moreover, it claims a more differentiated approach to DSS because it supplies previous generation cellular networks. Ericsson’s DSS software, for example, only supports 4G and 5G.

DSS interest among network operators is mixed. Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile US, dismissed the technology as a capacity hog during the operator’s most recent earnings call. 

“As you deploy DSS it kind of eats away the net capacity of the shared radio. And if you rush into that now, some of the early rollouts and work-arounds and pieces that we’ve seen are pretty corrosive and they would suck up capacity just by rolling out the feature,” he said in February.

Nonetheless, Nokia’s DSS release is a positive development, according to Pongratz. It and the radio portfolio expansion are required to ensure a competitive offering and those moves are “consistent with Nokia’s strategy to be well positioned in this ongoing transition from proprietary to virtualized RAN,” he said. 

The latest developments follow a period of heightened activity and disruption for Nokia. The vendor recently announced a pair of cloud-native software applications designed to help carriers improve the management and operation of their networks. 

It also unwrapped a series of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) features called Nokia AVA 5G Cognitive Operations. Those tools can help operators increase automation of network operations and make better decisions about network slices and service requirements, according to Nokia.

Nokia’s challenges amid a period of increased 5G deployment activity have also impacted the company’s executive ranks. The company last month announced that CEO Rajeev Suri will be leaving his position on Aug. 31. He will be replaced by Pekka Lundmark, who currently serves as CEO of Fortum, an energy company also headquartered in Espoo, Finland.