AT&T appears ready to make up with Nokia roughly nine months after it tossed the Finnish equipment maker to the side last year in favor of a $14 billion wireless open RAN deal with Ericsson.
Impact: The new five-year agreement between AT&T and Nokia focuses on wireline fiber rather than wireless, however, and while analysts predict it will provide the vendor with a relatively lucrative contract, it’s nowhere near as big as what the company lost on the wireless side and doesn’t negate the removal of its equipment from AT&T’s wireless network. Nevertheless, the deal comes at a good time for Nokia, which has faced rumors of late implying that its financial struggles could mean a sale of its mobile assets.
According to The Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen, the new deal indicates AT&T still considers Nokia a trusted network supplier. AT&T ended Q2 with 27.8 million fiber passings and plans to pass 30 million locations with fiber by the end of 2025. But CEO John Stankey and other executives have hinted that AT&T could add up to 15 million additional passings to that total if everything plays out right for the company. And that doesn’t even address additional fiber passings covered by AT&T-
BlackRock joint venture Gigapower or how many passings the company might add under the $42.5 billion BEAD program.
Under the terms of the deal, Nokia will support AT&T’s ongoing fiber network expansion and upgrade efforts by supplying its Lightspan MF platform and Altiplano Access Controller for use in the fiber network. According to LightReading, the Lightspan platform supports “a range of PON technologies,” anywhere from 10G all the way up to 100G. AT&T currently has XGS-PON deployed in its network, which supports its 2 Gbps and 5 Gbps offerings, but has looked at 25G-PON and beyond to offer faster speeds. The platform will make it easier for AT&T to switch from one level of PON technology to the next without upgrading its entire network infrastructure. AT&T described the Altiplano Access Controller as a “required component” working as a management system with the Lightspan platform on the back end.
Ahead of the deal announcement, Nokia revealed in August 2024 that its PON technologies are compliant with federal Build America, Buy America guidelines and can be used for BEAD deployments. Nokia followed BEAD program mandates and self-certified the 21 products as being built in the U.S. This should help AT&T better position itself to bid on BEAD-funded projects as broadband providers using BABA-compliant technologies and bidding on state grant funding will likely be looked upon more favorably than those using non-domestically manufactured equipment.
AT&T hasn’t given many hints as to how many BEAD projects it plans to pursue, or which states it’s targeting, but the company likely has its eye on a good-sized chunk of the program’s funding, which aims to extend fiber and other high-speed broadband to unserved and underserved locations in the country.
