Nokia held its annual Fixed Networks Analyst meeting this week, and we were impressed with the company’s progress. While the company explained that the BEAD program has slipped an estimated 6-9 months, it shared that its pipeline of deals remains healthy. The company characterized that BEAD will go through its active deployment phase from 2025 to 2029. We find that Nokia’s addressable market has changed significantly in the past year as US-based mobile operators have announced a number of acquisitions and partnerships with fiber operators (TMUS and more, AT&T, and Verizon deals); significant new investment activity is underway in new fiber infrastructure in the U.S. market. Part of the rationale for more fiber investment is the BEAD investment program’s existence, the success of MNO’s FWA rollouts, and the telecom industry’s pursuit of growth.
Nokia’s Fixed Networks (F.N.) group plans to offer all the major speeds in the PON market, spanning 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 25 Gbps, 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps. The company, of course, already offers 1, 10 and 25 Gbps and highlighted that its 50G PON offering is expected to be available in 2H25. The company has earmarked 2030 for the introduction of 100 Gbps PON. Nokia’s plans are aggressive and expansive in pursuing the PON market; it is now expanding to rural broadband providers, having just experienced a 10% rural broadband revenue increase in the past year. The company has seen private equity investments and co-investments as major catalysts for its opportunities both in North America and Latin America. Most of Nokia’s N.A. new business has a private equity investor involved.
The company discussed its FWA business in some detail and expects an upcoming demand for mmWave FWA soon. The company highlighted how it is commonplace that its mmWave devices can achieve multiple Gigabits per second at distances of nearly 1 km and notably on non-line-of-sight runs; earlier versions of products went only hundreds of meters and required line-of-sight. Nokia’s performance improvements and customer discussions give it confidence that its mmWave CPE will likely see new demand. The company also expects numerous other chip suppliers as early as 2025 besides the current two major FWA CPE players, Qualcomm and MediaTek.
A week before this conference, Nokia and Ruckus announced plans to “meet in the channel” in a non-exclusive arrangement to sell Nokia Optical LAN and Ruckus Wi-Fi to customers who embrace a change away from Ethernet Switches. The Ruckus representatives we met with at this meeting said that since the announcement, it has received a significant surge in demand for more information about Optical LAN-related deals.
We offer market share and forecast reports about the FWA, PON, satellite broadband, Enterprise WLAN, and WLAN semiconductor markets, which were the main subjects of this week’s Nokia gathering.