Nokia has declared more than 3,000 patent families to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as essential for the 5G standard, reflecting its continuing leadership and strong momentum in cellular technology R&D and standardisation.
Driven by world-class inventions from the renowned Nokia Bell Labs, which has invented many of the foundational 5G technologies that are commercial today, Nokia has played a leading role in pioneering key technologies for 5G, working with the 3GPP organisation to establish 5G standards and enabling the rollout of 5G networks. 3GPP is a partnership of seven standards development organisations including ETSI. Nokia had a key role in driving the first set of globally interoperable 5G standards to completion and is now contributing towards the next set of standards. Through its research innovation and standardisation leadership, Nokia enabled the ecosystem development for 5G technologies, paving the way for consumers and industries to have access to 5G faster and smoothly.
Nokia’s contributions in innovation and standardisation are the product of over €129bn of investment into research and development over the past two decades, and approximately €4.4bn R&D expenses last year alone. With the latest declarations, the portfolio of Nokia cellular standard essential patents (SEPs) declared to one or more of the 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G standards spans more than 3,400 patent families, of which more than 3,000 are relevant to 5G standards. This SEP portfolio has more than doubled in size over the past five years, with Nokia having a leading market share. Nokia Bell Labs produces the majority of these SEPs, and Nokia Technologies business manages and licenses this patent portfolio, with more than 200 licensees, including most major smartphone vendors and many automotive brands.
Beyond radio networks and technologies, Nokia’s end-to-end approach to 5G includes the fronthaul, backhaul and optical transport networking systems. Nokia Bell Labs recently announced a new world record in fiber optics to enable faster and higher capacity 5G networks for the future. Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs set the world record for the highest single carrier bit rate at 1.52 Terabits per second (Tbit/s) over 80 km of standard single mode fiber – the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 1.5 million YouTube videos – and four times the market’s previous capabilities of approximately 400 Gigabits per second. These innovations demonstrate Nokia’s ability to develop end-to-end technologies for the 5G era that meet the ever-growing data, capacity and latency demands of industrial Internet of Things and consumer applications.
The 5G standardisation process is managed by 3GPP. Within 3GPP, the technical specifications for 5G communications have been developed collaboratively, selecting the best technologies from those contributed by a range of innovators. Products which comply with the standard can work interoperably with those from other manufacturers, increasing consumer choice.
Marcus Weldon, Nokia Chief Technology Officer and President of Nokia Bell Labs, said, “Nokia has defined many of the fundamental technologies used in virtually all mobile devices and digital systems and networks, and these inventions are critical to the new Industrial Internet of Things era. We standardise these inventions to allow widespread utilisation and adoption. The benefits of 5G are initially in massive amounts of new capacity for consumers, but as the new technology and network architecture develops, it will enable new applications for enterprises and industrial businesses, with end-to-end 5G networks forming the critical fabric for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with Nokia Bell Labs once again at the heart of this revolution.”
Jenni Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies, said, “I am thrilled that our R&D efforts are creating new opportunities for the consumer and industrial technology ecosystem, as the 5G era gathers momentum. As an inventor for the long-term, Nokia is able to innovate for a 5G future because of the fair reward we earn through licensing the standardised technologies created from our extensive R&D investments. This virtuous cycle creates vast new potential in 5G technologies, and I am excited for the possibilities ahead.”
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