The COVID-19 crisis has, to varying extents, impacted research and development, supply chains, and the tempo of mobile network operator activities, Nokia executives said today during a media briefing.

“There have been some customers that have slightly pushed back their plans, but by and large it’s not a big impact,” said Mark Atkinson, SVP of 5G and small cells at Nokia. “Everybody’s looking to use this time to come out strong at the end. Whether that’s us or our customers, everyone wants to get the building blocks in place so when the situation with COVID improves that we’re again hitting the ground running.”

On the research and development front, Nokia’s contingency plans have effectively allowed thousands of engineers to continue coding and testing software remotely with the assistance of “skeleton crews” in its labs, Atkinson said. As a result, there’s been no slow down in the amount of code produced and test cases executed every month by Nokia’s engineers, he added.

The Finnish vendor has, as previously noted, experienced some disruptions in its supply chain, but those impacts have been largely mitigated and supply continues to ship to its customers, according to Atkinson. “We are pretty geographically diverse in terms of our supplier base and also where we do manufacturing.”

Nokia previously attributed a $200 million slide in revenue during the first quarter of 2020 to supply chain disruptions due to the global pandemic.

Company executives also addressed the state of 5G affairs in Canada following the recent decision by the country’s telecommunications regulators to delay the auction of 3.5 GHz spectrum for fixed wireless services until June 2021. The auction was previously scheduled to get underway in December 2020.

While the delay is unfortunate, and an increasingly common side effect of the COVID-19 outbreak, the availability of that mid-band spectrum will still align with the timing of availability in the U.S. market, said Mike Murphy, Nokia’s CTO of the Americas.

“The delta with the U.S. is not really significant,” he said, adding that mid-band spectrum remains the “sweet spot for 5G” and “everybody is eager to get their hands on it.”

Carrier planning for 5G deployments on mid-band spectrum in Canada is still underway but “priorities have shifted a bit” due to the pandemic, explained Ric Herald, president at Nokia Canada. 

“It’s probably slowed down the order process … at least from my perspective, what I see coming in and what we had forecasted,” he said. Those delays are largely attributable to carriers’ decisions to control capex amid prolonged uncertainty about the full extent of the coronavirus’ impact and how long it will negatively impact economic activity.

“Everyone’s been very cautious to make sure that they have enough capital reserve,” Herald said. “That conservativeness on the capital obviously affects what we had anticipated and even what they had anticipated spending. So, I wouldn’t say it’s been significant because our forecasting for 5G was relatively low in this year and assuming that the 3.5 [GHz spectrum] comes out over the year or early next year, much of the planning will be done, a lot of the testing will have been done, so they can make it up and start rolling out next year.”

While network deployment activity has slowed, security challenges haven’t let up during the crisis, noted Mary O’Neill, VP of security at Nokia.

“Even during this horrible crisis, we’ve seen bad actors taking advantage of that,” she said. “We’ve seen the introduction of COVID malware traffic going over the networks and we proactively work with our service providers to make sure we give them the proper protection.”

There’s also been a growing interest in ensuring the security of third-party suppliers as workforces around the globe shifted to work from home, O’Neill said. “It’s completely disrupted how we all work and how we all live, and all of a sudden those critical networks become even more important, and the need for security is really emphasized in the whole remoteness,” she said. 

“Our whole world has just changed and I think 5G is going to be very critical in terms of how we move forward,” O’Neill added. “We’ve seen a lot of regulations eased because they need to be eased, so our fundamental industry, our lives are changing, [and] from a security perspective and from an IoT perspective it’s been incredibly busy.”