Dish Network Chooses Nokia for 5G Build

September 15, 2020

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia announced that Dish Network has chosen Nokia’s cloud-native, standalone core software products to help it build what Dish calls the most advanced, disruptive, fully automated, cloud-native 5G network in the United States with high-level scale, performance and efficiency.

The deal follows months of joint testing as Nokia and Dish proved their respective any-cloud capabilities in multiple cloud environments, along with Nokia’s ability to integrate and deliver a cloud-native, containerized, end-to-end solution.

The agreement includes subscriber data management, device management, packet core, voice and data core, and integration services. Nokia will deliver additional cloud-native products to provide 4G, 5G standalone and voice-over-Wi-Fi access to core network functions.

These products will provide Dish with the speed, agility, intelligence and security to deliver new 5G-era services, while cost-effectively managing its network with near zero-touch automation and adherence to service-level agreements (SLAs).

Nokia said that it leads the market in core network deployments, with 25 of the top 40 communication service providers relying on Nokia Core network products.

Marc Rouanne, Dish chief network officer, said: “This is an important step in bringing to life Dish’s plans to deliver the first open, agile, virtualized 5G network in the United States. Nokia’s new release is cloud-native, standalone and ready for full automation, providing Dish with the software capabilities required to deliver thousands of network slices with low latency and SLA on demand.”

Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software and Nokia’s chief digital officer, said: “The benefits of Nokia’s industry-leading, cloud-native standalone 5G Core products built on our proven Common Software Foundation — near-zero-touch automation capabilities, high-level operational efficiencies, scale and performance — continue to set us apart from the competition.

Source: Nokia

Analyst’s Take

Jonathan Chaplin, analyst, New Street Research, wrote in a research note that Dish has announced five network partners so far, including 1) Mavenir for Open RAN software (see comments on the important of ORAN from Blair and Pierre); 2) Altiostar for additional ORAN software; 3) Fujitsu for RAN hardware; 4) Matrixx for BSS / OSS software support, and; 5) VMware for its cloud platform.

“The selection of Nokia is one more piece of the puzzle,” Chaplin wrote. “We expect the picture of the network to come into clearer focus in coming weeks with the announcement of more network partners. While investors are mostly focused on the anchor tenants and capital, we have argued that the network partners are by far the most important catalyst. If Dish delivers a credible network plan the tenants and capital should follow; if they don’t lay out a credible network plan, they won’t get tenants and capital. As such, we have been focused on network partners.”