Nokia Inks A USD 1.5 Billion Cloud Network Deal

China Mobile chooses Nokia to provide the infrastructure and equipment to power it’s cloud network

Nokia, the seemingly almost-dead Finnish Telecom company just entered into a major deal with China Mobile, a state-owned telecom company in China that provides mobile voice and multimedia services throughout the world’s second largest country.

To first clear up the primary concern ‘wasn’t Nokia under Microsoft?’, I’d like to mention that Microsoft had only bought out the Mobile Phones division of Nokia back in 2014, and the rest of the company had still remained intact under their CEO Rajeev Suri.
Microsoft struggled with Phones business too, and recently sold it off to Foxconn.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s Suri focused the residual company towards the more profitable Network Equipment Division of Nokia Networks.
Nokia Technologies too, got attention as it works on developing and licensing technologies to clients all around the world. And it’s still quite a bread earner.

The current deal with China Mobile involves the cloud networking division of China Mobile. As part of the deal, Nokia will provide the Chinese company with infrastructure and equipment for operating a cloud network. This will include a new type of 5G-ready base station enabling numerous radio technologies to function at the same time as well as support various connection speeds at the same time.

Just so you know, China Mobile and Nokia actually have a longstanding history — in fact, they’ve also been working together on projects since 1994! The last deal that they worked together on was in 2014, and was worth USD 970 Million.

The current USD 1.5 Billion deal with Nokia is expected to bring China Mobile quality infrastructural support and equipment, which is absolutely vital to any cloud networking provider’s long term aspirations.

While the deal is slotted only for one year, but since it is aimed at “seamless connectivity that will more efficiently meet the ever-growing data demands”, as said by the Nokia spokesperson, we can expect that it will last longer as China moves even deeper into the Digital Age.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.