Nokia today announced Cloud Packet Core, a product that spans mobile technology as well as IP networking.

Now that Alcatel-Lucent has been merged into the company, Nokia is starting to roll out products based on its larger technology portfolio. And it didn’t want to simply virtualize existing products, but rather it wanted to consider the bigger picture of technology for the future.

“At Nokia we took a step back,” says Nick Cadwgan, a director of product marketing for the company. “Yes, the market has jumped into virtualizing. But just virtualizing the packet core was not going to be good enough.”

And although consumer mobile has been a big part of Nokia’s legacy, the company sees broadband growth as part of its future. It wants to engage not only with mobile consumers, but also with residential and enterprise broadband users as well as business verticals and initiatives such as smart cities.

Nokia’s new software aims to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together: the evolved packet core, a range of access technologies, and cloud capabilities. It's built with cloud-native architecture. It supports both wireless and fixed access technologies, whether licensed or unlicensed, that can be used separately or combined to deliver services. “We’re really driving to the access-agnostic core,” says Cadwgan. “We’re giving this to the market cloud-native.”

So where does this converged core reside? “For mobile it would be the packet core,” says Cadwgan. “For broadband it might be the central office. It can be wherever, physically.”

Cloud Packet Core is fundamentally software that is disaggregated into components. Organizations can deploy the functional elements that make sense for them wherever they have server infrastructure.

While 5G evolves, Nokia’s Cloud Packet Core supports the nearer-term goals of enhanced mobile broadband as well as Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine use cases.