Just announced today, T-Mobile and Nokia have struck a $3.5 billion agreement to build out a US wide 5G network with Nokia doing much of the heavy lifting in providing the actual 5G technology.
As part of the agreement, Nokia will supply US-based T-Mobile with 5G technology that includes AirScale radio platforms, AirFrame hardware, CloudBand software, 5G Accleration services and cloud-native core software.
The new 5G partnership with T-Mobile marks the largest gain by Nokia to-date, with Nokia touting the strength of its productive working relationships with other companies.
“Nokia and T-Mobile will advance the large-scale deployment of 5G services throughout the United States. This is a testament to our companies’ strong and productive working relationship, one which has produced several important technological milestones in recent months, and which now allows us to make 5G commercial reality.” – Ashish Chowdhary, Chief Customer Operations Officer at Nokia
As for the specific technology, T-Mobile 5G network will utilize 600MHz and 28GHz mmWave spectrum according TmoNews.
While T-Mobile has announced its deployment schedule of 5G coverage to 30 US cities by 2018, the company doesn’t plan to sell any 5G enabled phones until early 2019, giving the company some time to test out the kinks.
The Nokia and T-Mobile 5G deal is yet another sign of the company’s brand recovering from the disastrous Microsoft Windows Phone deal.
It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft and Nokia dance in this new evolution of cloud computing and increased mobile bandwidth