Nokia’s affirmation as Tampnet’s RAN provider for a serious offshore 5G build-out begs questions in regards to the vendor’s future personal 5G technique – simply as employees throughout Europe protest its restructuring plans, which incorporates the sale of its personal 5G unit.
Outdated information, new tensions – Nokia’s Tampnet deal recycles outdated information, however arrives amid discontent about restructuring, EU job cuts, and Nokia’s perceived westwards migration.
Dilemma for ‘new Nokia’ – it illustrates a pivot to box-shifting RAN gross sales over complicated service offers; it raises questions on how its outdated ECE and new MI models will coexist.
EU telecoms petition – telecoms employees in Europe have began a petition in opposition to the perceived ‘Americanisation’ of Nokia, and in addition Ericsson; 500 signatures, and counting.
Norway-based private-networks specialist Tampnet – lined in these pages for 5 years no less than, since approach earlier than the remainder of the mainstream telecoms commerce press determined that personal mobile was value overlaying – has confirmed Nokia as its RAN associate for offshore oil fields within the Gulf of Mexico. Nokia tools might be paired with core community software program from US-based Mavenir. So is that this what the way forward for personal 5G appears like for Nokia – simple field gross sales for fast returns, versus built-in options on escalating service offers?
It’s an open query, doing the rounds on-line following a press word from Nokia yesterday (December 2) – which, successfully, recycled outdated information. Tampnet’s tie-up with Mavenir was picked up by RCR Wi-fi again in July; Nokia’s involvement on the RAN facet, as a part of a cut-and-shut twin-play with Mavenir (which additionally noticed Ericsson ousted from the combo), was put proper (moderately triumphantly) in different media. The purpose is, it’s yesterday’s information, confirmed by Nokia following some tumult about its transfer to promote its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) division, plus others.
The ECE determination, after all, attended the announcement of the agency’s structural reorganisation at its Capital Markets Day on November 19, bookended by headcount reductions in Europe and monetary investments within the US. It ought to be famous that Nokia has responded to the criticism, and defined its choices by way of its acknowledged AI progress technique and its world R&D standing. However the fall-out will rumble on; an open petition to “save EU telecoms, networks, and AI know-how” (“earlier than it’s gone”) has gained 500 signatures because it went dwell final week (December 26).
It cites the creeping Americanisation of each Nokia and Ericsson; the feedback are value studying, signed by telecoms trade employees (whether or not from Nokia, Ericsson, or elsewhere) in France and Germany, clearly, but additionally from throughout Europe – together with Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. It received’t do a lot, certainly, but it surely illustrates the ill-feeling throughout the ranks at Nokia, and existential considerations within the EU. Anecdotally, Nokia employees from the UK (on high of EU-based employees), and in addition South Korea, have since been in contact with RCR Wi-fi to offer their view on proceedings.
In the meantime, the Finnish agency’s personal 5G take care of Tampnet – primarily based purely on gross sales of 5G AirScale radios – is sizeable, as mentioned beforehand: past simply the Gulf of Mexico, Tampnet will swap-out present gear for a brand new Nokia/Mavenir combo throughout its whole offshore footprint of “120 lively base stations”; it is going to additionally “lengthen protection” to 350-400 platforms, rigs, floating manufacturing storage and offloading (FPSO) models, wind farms, and different vessels. No query, it’s a large-scale personal 5G undertaking, of the kind that Tampnet has nailed down.
Tampnet, headquartered in Stavanger, has already deployed personal 4G / 5G for oil and power clients at 350-odd different rigs and vessels within the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of Trinidad & Tobago and Canada. It holds spectrum for personal offshore mobile deployments at 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz and a pair of.6 GHz, and owns North Sea fibre cable as nicely. In March, it signed a deal to produce fibre connectivity and providers for the offshore Trion Undertaking within the Gulf of Mexico – the place the Nokia announcement focuses.
The Trion Undertaking is a three way partnership for oil manufacturing between Woodside Petróleo Operaciones de México and PEMEX Exploración y Producción, in operator and non-operator roles. It’s Tampnet’s first “entry into Mexican waters”, it famous, and sees it lengthen round 1,500 kilometres of subsea fibre within the deepwater area of the Gulf of Mexico with an additional 200 kilometres of subsea cable. In July, Tampnet introduced a take care of Norwegian oil exploration agency Aker BP to put in personal 5G on the Edvard Grieg oil discipline on the Norwegian continental shelf.
Italian defence agency Leonardo can be concerned; the undertaking will lengthen to 6 additional platforms (Yggdrasil, Fenris, Valhall, Alvheim, Ivar Aasen, and Skarv), throughout the North Sea and Norwegian Sea. In August, a deal to ship personal 5G from Nokia (and HPE/Athonet; plus LEO back-haul with Starlink and OneWeb), for offshore contractor Island Drilling. It’s also working with Norwegian oil and fuel firm Vår Energi to offer edge-based 4G/5G and compute providers to a FPSO unit referred to as Jotun, positioned within the Balder oil discipline within the North Sea.
All which says Tampnet is a critical participant in offshore networks; all of which we all know already, if now we have been studying RCR Wi-fi for the final 5 years. So what of this take care of Nokia, to increase their North Sea efforts to the Gulf of Mexico? Arnt Erling Skavdal, chief know-how officer for cellular know-how at Tampnet, mentioned: “This funding will allow us to satisfy the evolving connectivity and automation wants of offshore industries, improve employee security and unlock new digital functions that weren’t doable earlier than.”
Jeff Pittman, head of ‘North America enterprise’ in Nokia’s cellular networks division (about to be absorbed into its ‘cellular infrastructure’ unit), talked about digital change in “among the world’s most difficult environments”. However what does it say of the brand new Nokia, and its place on personal 5G? Nicely, it’s helpful enterprise, clearly, however, as acknowledged on the high, it’s also a RAN-only undertaking, which locations Nokia right into a ‘Frankenstein’ integration with a third-party core supplier – as US start-up Celona likes to say to differentiate itself from most different non-Nokia distributors out there.
It additionally palms all the service upside to another person. In fact, Nokia has at all times performed these RAN offers; its radios are thought-about to be glorious. Lots of its earliest initiatives within the ‘campus’ sector paired them with an Athonet (HPE) core community. Additionally, a lot of the heavy lifting with programs integration goes to… nicely, system integrators, with which Nokia’s ECE division has developed shut relationships. However as somebody at Nokia mentioned to RCR Wi-fi: “It’s only a RAN deal, and Nokia may do extra work and get three-to-five instances the income with a managed service contract. The brand new Nokia desires pennies in its pocket – moderately than the larger deal, larger revenue, recurring earnings.”
In fact, a spun-off ECE division will discover its proposition is difficult, doubtlessly, by its separation from Nokia – as a Frankenstein resolution, nominally, with out the big-brand popularity (‘Nokia received’t simply vanish’; ‘nobody bought fired for getting Nokia’) that it has loved till now – that’s, except a spun-off ECE enterprise will get a good RAN reseller settlement with the brand new ‘cellular infrastructure’ division. (Each events would have pursuits, right here: ECE would be capable of push forward with its outdated RAN knowhow, and Nokia would get a well-oiled path to a 50-odd % share of the fast-growing industrial 5G campus market.)
Anyway; numerous questions, nonetheless. We are going to comply with this story because it develops.
