Nokia announced that it had reached 63 commercial 5G contracts worldwide, positioning among the global leaders in the delivery of end-to-end 5G solutions.

The figure includes Nokia's 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.”

The 63 signed commercial contracts exclude any other type of 5G agreements, such as paid network trials, pilots or demonstrations. If such agreements were to be included, the total number of 5G agreements would reach over 100. Nokia is also a vendor of choice for almost all of the leading early adopter 5G markets. This includes AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US and Verizon in the US; 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.

“We have more than 350 customers in 4G, but these 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”, Uitto said.

Nokia's end-to-end product portfolio covers all 5G network elements, including radio, core, cloud and transport as well as management, automation and security. Nokia sid that approximately 60% of its 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. Nokia is now contributing towards the next set of 5G standards, Release 16.