Nokia releases radio software upgrade for 4G/LTE to 5G/NR

Nokia released a software update to enable its 4G/LTE radios to be migrated seamlessly to 5G/NR.

Nokia said 5 million legacy 4G radios are eligible for the upgrade. The company expects its customers to bring this support for approximately one million radios immediately, reaching 3.1 million by the end of the year and over 5 million in 2021. The upgrade will help to streamline the process of refarming 4G/LTE spectrum into 5G/NR. Nokia estimates that this solution will save the telecommunications industry potentially tens of billions of euros in site engineering and re-visit costs as communication service providers are able to upgrade their networks to 5G/NR on FDD with software. 

Most of the 5G/NR deployments to date have been performed with TDD cmWave and TDD mmWave deployment but the next big wave of 5G/NR rollouts will be delivered by refarming existing FDD bands to 5G/NR. TDD spectrum benefits from enlarged coverage and capacity when combined with already deployed FDD network infrastructure and spectrum bands via TDD/FDD Carrier Aggregation.

Nokia also confirmed that its Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) is already live networks covering 2G/GSM-3G/WCDMA-4G/LTE and that the DSS capability was recently introduced for 4G/LTE-5G/NR. This capability completes a DSS solution, covering all access technologies and making the radio frequency refarming to 5G/NR a simple and efficient process.

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: “We already provide market- leading LTE radios to hundreds of customers around the world. This is an important solution because it will help our customers, quickly and efficiently upgrade their existing LTE radios so that they are 5G ready saving them time and money.”