Nokia’s first massive multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) 5G radios featuring its less expensive and more energy efficient system-on-a-chip (SoC) are now commercially available.

The release marks another milestone in Nokia’s years-long effort to dig itself out of early misfires on 5G silicon. The Finnish vendor also released baseband plug-in cards and remote radio heads featuring its latest ReefShark SoC chipsets.

Nokia’s AirScale 5G radios with massive MIMO antennas come in two forms — a version with 32 transmitters and receivers, and another with 64. Nokia claims the 32TRX product is the industry’s lightest massive MIMO product at 17 kilograms, but it’s not necessarily comparing weights on a like-for-like basis.

Ericsson earlier this year revealed a 20 kilogram massive MIMO unit and Huawei followed up days later with a 19 kilogram offering, but both of those featured 64 transmitters and receivers.

The compact footprint and lightweight features are important “because the large-scale installation of massive MIMO gear across a network is no small expense, and compact, lightweight designs can help operators minimize deployment costs,” Ed Gubbins, principal analyst at GlobalData, explained in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

Nokia’s early missteps on 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment likely contributed to a major loss of business with Verizon last year, but the company entered 2021 operating under new CEO Pekka Lundmark’s three-year turnaround plan and four business units.

Lundmark teased the pending release of Nokia’s new massive MIMO 5G radios during the company’s latest earnings call, claiming the gear will have “wider bandwidth” and weigh less than the competition. Massive MIMO are critically important for 5G operators as they accelerate deployments in mid-band spectrum, which promises to deliver the lift in speeds and coverage made possible by 5G frameworks.

“5G networks are absolutely critical for improving network capacity and performance, particularly when higher bandwidth is in demand. Nokia’s new portfolio addresses these concerns by enabling mobile operators to flexibly scale capacity while helping to smoothly transition to 5G from existing technologies easily and cost effectively,” Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst at IDC, said in a statement.

Nokia’s new SoCs, which are included in its new radios and baseband, “boost performance and capacity” and the vendor’s latest massive MIMO antennas “set a new benchmark for low weight without compromising on performance,” he added.

The company’s more competitive and feature-rich SoCs were present in 44% of all 5G units shipped during the first quarter of 2021, and Nokia said it’s on track to hit its target of 70% by the end of 2021. It expects all 5G shipments to be equipped with the new SoC by the end of next year. 

“Silicon is a very, very important part in the overall competitiveness because it really [defines] the ability to support certain features and functionalities: the connectivity, the capacity, power consumption, product size and weight, and product cost. All of these are important in the radio business,” Tommi Uitto, president of Nokia’s Mobile Networks business, told SDxCentral in a recent phone interview.

The RAN vendor also stands out among the top three radio suppliers as the most supportive of virtualized and open RAN, going so far as to call it the future of the RAN business. “Our new AirScale products are open RAN ready,” Uitto said in a statement. 

Nokia said its 32TRX supports 200 megahertz of occupied bandwidth and up to 400 megahertz of instantaneous bandwidth. The new plug-in baseband cards can support 90,000 simultaneous connections and 84 Gb/s in throughput, which calculates to an eight-fold increase in throughput and cells served compared to the previous generation, the company added.