In early February Patently Apple posted a report titled "The U.S. Attorney General reveals that a U.S. Consortium may take a Controlling Stake in Nokia and/or Ericsson for 5G." William Barr noted at a recent conference at the FBI headquarters that the only alternative to Huawei's 5G networks are Nokia and Ericsson. At present these companies don't have Huawei's scale nor a home base like China. Barr added that "There are some proposals that these concerns can be met by the United States aligning itself with Nokia and/or Ericsson through American ownership of a controlling stake either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied companies."

While these companies are in talks with each other on creating an alternative 5G system to Huawei, today Nokia announced their collaboration with Intel on 5G networks.

Nokia is Collaborating with Intel on 5G

Nokia announced today that it has collaborated with Intel on technology advancements for its 5G radio portfolio. The companies have worked closely on the new Intel Atom® P5900 processor that combines compute, connectivity and acceleration technologies.

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: "This partnership highlights our continued commitment to ensuring our 5G portfolio is underpinned by best-in-class technology. 5G networks need to support billions of devices and machines, and this massive increase in volume and scale means that existing infrastructure and components must evolve rapidly, adopting technologies and techniques to enable to deploy 5G networks quickly."

Dan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Network Platforms Group, said: "Implementing technology innovations from the core to the edge of the network is key to unlocking the full potential of 5G. Through our collaboration with Nokia, our broad portfolio of products and ASIC capabilities, we are showing the value that can be realized with a consistent, high-performance architecture across the intelligent 5G network."

The jointly developed custom silicon solutions are included in Nokia’s AirScale radio access products being shipped worldwide as part of its 5G “Powered by ReefShark” portfolio. By adopting ReefShark widely in its AirScale portfolio, Nokia is significantly boosting performance and lowering the energy footprint of 5G network rollouts. In addition, Nokia will continue to adopt the latest general purpose Intel Xeon processor in its AirFrame cloud data center solution.

To realize the benefits of a common architecture from cloud to edge, Nokia and Intel will further their collaboration by incorporating the latest Intel Xeon processor technology in Nokia’s cloud infrastructure.

Nokia’s AirFrame data center solution for edge and core also uses the latest second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor with built-in AI acceleration. The processor is also included in both Nokia’s AirScale all-in-cloud virtual RAN (vRAN) and 5G core solutions to meet the requirements demanded by 5G technologies. Nokia’s AirScale Cloud RAN virtualizes radio functions to deliver ultra-low latency and high bit rates for demanding services, as well as providing the flexibility to deliver scalability, agility and operational efficiency to meet demand.

For more on Intel's technology, review their report titled "Product Fact Sheet: Accelerating 5G Network Infrastructure, from the Core to the Edge."