KIANEWS 
HMD Global today unveiled its latest smartphone, the HMD Fusion, an affordable device whose idea is to change functions and style with a shell. This is how the HMD Fusion will initially be distributed, but additional devices will be available later this year.
Nokia may be kicked out of T-Mobile USA
19. 11. 2024 Tuesday / By: Robert Denes / Business / Exact time: BST / Print this page
E arl Lum, an analyst at EJL Wireless Research, says there’s a good chance Nokia could lose T-Mobile’s business as well. To be clear, neither company has said that’s happening. In fact, officials from both Nokia and T-Mobile have repeatedly stated their intention to continue working together.
But Lum’s opinion on the matter matters. He’s the analyst who first reported that AT&T was removing Nokia from its network, just days before the carrier announced its historic $14 billion Nokia rip-and-replace deal with Ericsson.
“Is there a real chance that Nokia will go on strike (0-3 in American baseball terms) in the U.S. mobile market? Our sources and channel checks say potentially and very likely yes,”Lum wrote on social media Tuesday. “And if EJL Wireless Research were T-Mobile USA, we would be there from a purely technical perspective.”
In his post, Lum makes a long and detailed argument for T-Mobile to remove Nokia from its network due to nearly a decade of technical shortcomings in Nokia’s T-Mobile equipment. Lum specifically highlighted the weight, performance, and cooling deficiencies of Nokia’s equipment, including its latest radio offering that supports Massive MIMO technology.
Lum wrote that in 2022, T-Mobile replaced Nokia equipment with Ericsson equipment in most of Florida, all of Georgia, and small parts of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama in an effort called “project excalibur.”
“So the switch has already happened once recently,”Lum wrote.
"We MAY be wrong in the end (very unlikely) and that won't happen and T-Mobile USA decides to forgive Nokia from the funeral home at the 11th hour, but we think the one-vendor, Cloud/AI RAN Thanksgiving Turkey dinner/offer with all the fixings and unlimited open bar that Ericsson has prepared and put on the table might be too good a deal to pass up," Lum wrote.
Lum is a longtime analyst in the US wireless industry, known for tearing apart manufacturers' products to examine their innards. He was profiled in a 2021 Wall Street Journal article.
Again, neither Nokia nor T-Mobile have publicly indicated a rift between the two companies. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said last year, after AT&T dumped Nokia, that "we value our relationship with Nokia and Ericsson." "We see this as an advantage to be able to buy the stack from multiple partners."
T-Mobile also recently sold its 3.45GHz spectrum, eliminating the need for the carrier's dual-band equipment that supports both C-band and 3.45GHz spectrum. Lum said Nokia had struggled to develop such dual-band equipment.
T-Mobile, for its part, has largely completed the rollout of its primary 5G network. That rollout has focused primarily on the 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum T-Mobile acquired from Sprint in 2020.
The carrier's next major RAN upgrade involves densifying its network with more cell sites. This includes T-Mobile deploying its C-band spectrum in locations where additional capacity may be needed. T-Mobile has deployed 60% of its mid-band spectrum so far, though not its C-band shares yet.
Via Link