Nokia announced recently that it sealed 63 commercial 5G contracts worldwide. The telecommunications and information technology company strikes deals with customers such as AT&T, KDDI, Korea Telecom, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, O2, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Sprint, STC, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Vodafone Italy and Zain Saudi from key 5G early adopter and progressive markets.

“This milestone highlights the quality and customer confidence in our 5G portfolio and we expect this to continue this year with the addition of many more new deals,” said Tommi Uitto, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia.

“Our global end-to-end portfolio includes products and services for every part of a network, which are helping network operators to enable key 5G capabilities such as network slicing, distributed cloud and the industrial Internet of Things. We are delighted that our technologies are helping to shape the delivery and deployment of 5G technologies worldwide and the myriad benefits these will bring to businesses and consumers alike.”

Have you read “Nokia announces over 2,000 5G patent declarations“?

According to Nokia’s news advisory, the 5G deals would have gone over 100 if the list included paid network trials, pilots or demonstrations.

Other companies that had been working with Nokia for 5G efforts include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US and Verizon in the United States; Korea Telecom, LG Uplus and SK Telecom in South Korea; NTT DOCOMO, KDDI and SoftBank in Japan; Vodafone in Italy; O2 in the UK, Optus and Vodafone Hutchison in Australia; Elisa and Telia in Finland and du in the UAE and STC and Zain in Saudi Arabia.

“Nokia is the only network supplier whose 5G technology has been contracted by all four nationwide operators in the US, all three operators in South Korea and all three nationwide operators in Japan”, Uitto said. “We have more than 350 customers in 4G, but those first 63 customers represent some two-thirds of our global Radio Access Networks business in a typical year. Further, these 63 contracts — across the most important pioneering markets, across low bands, middle bands and high bands, and across traditional and cloud network architectures — provide us with invaluable early experiences and insights for the benefit of the rest of the world. So, it is a great start”, he continued.

Nokia has been aggressively working on developing and expanding its 5G portfolio rolling out the technology in many countries. With regard to use cases, the Finnish company’s sights are trained on radio core, cloud and transport, management, automation, and security.

According to the company, approximately 60% of Nokia’s 5G customers select more than just New Radio from its end-to-end portfolio.

Nokia also declared more than 2,000 5G patent families as essential for 5G, a year after making its first declarations for the standard.