The person behind the decision is Marc Rouanne (pictured), Dish’s chief network officer, who was Nokia’s president of mobile networks until 2018.
Dish’s new network capability has been carved out of spectrum allocated by T-Mobile US in a deal to win approval for its takeover earlier this year of Sprint.
Rouanne (pictured) left Nokia after the Finnish company merged its fixed networks and mobile networks units into a single division – and lost the fight to lead the unified access networks division.
Today’s Nokia/Dish deal follows months of joint testing as the two companies proved their respective “any cloud” capabilities in multiple cloud environments, along with Nokia’s ability to integrate and deliver a fully cloud-native, containerised, end-to-end solution.
The agreement includes subscriber data management, device management, packet core, voice and data core, as well as integration services. Nokia will also deliver additional cloud-native products that will provide 4G, 5G standalone and Voice over Wi-Fi access to core network functions.
Rouanne said: “This is an important step in bringing to life Dish’s plans to deliver the first open, agile, virtualized 5G network in the US. Nokia’s new release is cloud-native, standalone and ready for full automation, providing Dish the software capabilities required to deliver thousands of network slices with low latency and SLA [service-level agreement] on demand.”
Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software and Nokia’s chief digital officer, said: “The benefits of Nokia’s industry-leading, cloud-native standalone 5G core products built on our proven common software foundation – near-zero-touch automation capabilities, high-level operational efficiencies, scale and performance – continue to set us apart from the competition. Dish has great ambition and we are both excited and laser-focused on helping them deliver on that.”
Two weeks ago Dish added to the spectrum that it won as part of the T-Mobile US-Sprint agreement by spending almost $920 million on 3.5GHz licences from the Federal Communications Commission.
