Analyst Earl Lum, of EJL Wireless Research, believes there is a good chance that Nokia will lose T-Mobile's business too.
To be clear, neither company has said that's happening. Moreover, officials from both Nokia and T-Mobile have repeatedly stated their intention to continue to work together.
But Lum's opinion on the topic counts. He's the analyst who first reported that AT&T would remove Nokia from its network just days before the operator announced its historic $14 billion Nokia rip-and-replace program with Ericsson.
Verizon started a similar anti-Nokia operation just three years before AT&T.
"Is there a real possibility of a strike-out (0-3 in US baseball terms) for Nokia in the United States mobile market? Our sources and channel checks say potentially and most likely, yes," Lum wrote on social media Tuesday. "And if EJL Wireless Research was T-Mobile USA, we would from a purely technical perspective."
In response to questions from Light Reading, T-Mobile issued this statement: "T-Mobile works with both Nokia and Ericsson, who have helped us over the years build the largest and fastest 5G network in the nation. We continue to work with them on ensuring our customers have the best mobile network experience. We have made no decision to end our working relationship with Nokia."
For its part, Nokia issued this statement in response to Lum's post: "Nokia is proud to be T-Mobile's long-standing partner in Radio Access Networks (RAN). We are confident in our industry-leading portfolio which has helped us grow market share with many of our existing RAN customers as well as to win completely new ones. ... In response to some recent analyst claims, Nokia states that these comments mainly relate to its first generation 5G products designed in 2018. Since then, strong investment in R&D, System on Chip technology and new product launches have positioned Nokia as one of the market leaders globally. This is visible in the customer contracts we have recently won."
The reasoning
In his post, Lum makes a lengthy and detailed argument for T-Mobile to remove Nokia from its network due to almost ten years of technical shortcomings in Nokia's equipment for T-Mobile. Lum specifically pointed to the weight, power and cooling inadequacies of Nokia's equipment, including its latest radio offerings supporting Massive MIMO technology.
Nokia officials have disputed those criticisms.
Lum wrote that, in 2022, T-Mobile replaced Nokia's equipment with Ericsson's equipment across most of Florida, all of Georgia, and in smaller parts of South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama in an effort dubbed "project excalibur."
"So, a swap out has already occurred once in the very recent past," Lum wrote.
"In the end, MAYBE we are wrong (highly unlikely) and it will not happen and T-Mobile USA decides to pardon Nokia from death row at the 11th hour but we believe that the single vendor Cloud/AI RAN Thanksgiving Turkey dinner/offer with all of the fixings and unlimited open bar that Ericsson has prepared and put on the table may be too good of a deal to pass up," Lum wrote.
Lum is a longtime analyst in the US wireless industry, known for disassembling vendors' products to investigate their innards. He was profiled in a Wall Street Journal article in 2021.
BFFs?
Again, neither Nokia nor T-Mobile has publicly indicated a schism between the two companies. Indeed, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said last year, after AT&T dropped Nokia, that "we really deeply value our partnerships with both Nokia and Ericsson, and see that as an advantage that we can buy up and down the stack from multiple partners."
More recently, T-Mobile named both Ericsson and Nokia to the AI radio access network (RAN) testing lab it launched with AI chip vendor Nvidia.
T-Mobile also recently sold its 3.45GHz spectrum holdings, thereby removing the operator's need for dual-band equipment that supports both C-band and 3.45GHz spectrum. Lum said Nokia has had trouble developing that kind of dual-band equipment.
T-Mobile, for its part, has largely finished its primary 5G network buildout. That buildout focused mainly on the 2.5GHz midband spectrum T-Mobile acquired from Sprint in 2020.
The operator's next major RAN upgrade will involve densifying its network with more cell sites. It will also involve T-Mobile deploying its C-band spectrum into locations where it might be needed for additional capacity. T-Mobile so far has deployed 60% of its midband spectrum holdings, though none of its C-band holdings yet.
The broader market
As for Nokia, the company continues to struggle in the mobile market. It lost Verizon's business in 2020, and then AT&T's business in 2023.
But Nokia isn't the only RAN vendor that's struggling. A global slowdown in operator spending has affected all of the market's players, from Ericsson to Samsung.
Indeed, research firm Dell'Oro Group recently reported that the overall global RAN market declined again in the third quarter of 2024. That, the firm said, is the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline in the sector.
Nokia remains a subject of debate, however. For example, Samsung in August was rumored to be preparing a possible $10 billion takeover of Nokia's mobile business.
Article updated November 19 to add a statement from T-Mobile and Nokia.