For those looking for some context around Nokia, the service provider for a big WAN I am familiar with (Cox) is all run on Nokia gear. Also, nearly every local police dept I am familiar with runs a Nokia firewall.
If it weren't for geopolitics, Nokia probably would not be around at all at this point.
The world is still visiting the Huawei stop on the journey to consolidated, commodity networking hardware.
Go to your AWS dashboard and set up a VPN gateway. There are about 15 different vendors for which AWS can generate router configuration.
Does any of that make sense? Software has basically consolidated around like 5 platforms for 95% of problems: the browser, Android, AMD64 in data centers running functionally fungible and undifferentiated Linux distributions, Windows on AMD64 on PCs, and iOS native. Gaming consoles & "CUDA" making a strong showing after that, but if that all vanished tomorrow, people could play games on Windows computers and ChatGPT would be way way more expensive.
Then there's a long tail of weirdo crap that will die as quickly as it came to be, supported by people who conflate "existence" with "making sense."
All of networking hardware is weirdo crap platforms! Networking people are going to come out of the woodwork like audiophiles, talking about P4 and eBPF and whatever. I'm sure Nokia Router OS or whatever it's called is very innovative. There used to be a lot of PC vendors too! At the end of the day none of those differentiators are protectible, and they are fundamentally laundering free innovations done by a very small number of people, like Linux Kernel developer. They will not stick around.
> they are fundamentally laundering free innovations done by a very small number of people, like Linux Kernel developer. They will not stick around
There's a big difference between inventing something (Linus Torvalds as the "genius big picture guy" who gets paid in fame) and turning it into a viable business that customers can depend on (the boring "execution guy" who gets paid in money).
It's like how research labs in universities often develop some new technology, and a for-profit firm takes it to market. People get all up in arms about this laundering of free innovations without realizing that the two take very different skill-sets and require very different incentive structures.
It makes sense that research gets spun off into commercial technologies. It doesn't make sense for there to be 15 different vendors, each claiming to have a special technology, when it was all the same free technology all along. Their differentiation is imaginary. That's why I use the word laundering in one sense: they are turning the same innovation used by everyone into a fake unique innovation in their marketing materials.
Now, it's not network hardware people alone who do this. You can go to DuckDuckGo or Cloudflare, they do the same thing, they give fancy proprietary-sounding names to free stuff they pick up off the Internet too. I'm not saying that's bad, and I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It does exist, it is good. It just isn't something that sustains 15 companies all doing it at the same time, just one company can do that, it will take all the prizes. And that's why it's laundering, because the competition was imaginary, you might as well have gone straight to the source in the first place, and indeed, that will happen! It happens in operating systems, which encompass huge amounts of software functionality nowadays, it will happen in networking hardware.
My (limited) understanding of heavy network hardware is that it is the way it is because of compatibility.
No one running backbone or DC gear wants to be bitten by edge-case-bug-of-the-month, and so they stick to approved configurations, which are usually vendor-specific for specialized functionality. Because that's what you need to run in order to trigger your "Have a vendor engineer here in 20 minutes" support clause.
There's always a tug between the market (wants vendors to support standards) vs vendors (want market locked into their solutions). As a result, inter-vendor qualification is limited to the minimum they can get away with.
Networking is a combination of hyper-specific hardware solutions "this ASIC targets the mid sized enterprise core and has features specialized to doing that role best, the lower tier version from even the same manufacturer and family however has these limitations... and this carrier focused L2 switch seems similar at a glance but actually has a nearly non-overlapping choice of hardware features baked in" and few (outside of the hyperscaler-like crowd) who actually want to manage that themselves despite knowing no generalized solution is really ready to manage it well either. This results in a massive amount of NOS customization and backwards compatibility that changes horizontally, vertically, and each generation in time. In the meantime, anyone who thinks they can optimize a specific use case better can introduce a new weird device and become popular because it achieves that use case at a great price.
That said, things have been moving in the right direction. E.g. the newer "Nokia Router OS" SR Linux is "just" bog standard Linux with a microservices based service layer which implements industry standard APIs for configuration and telemetry streaming. It still has a lot of legacy stuff, and even a replica of the classic CLI built on top of these APIs, but there is a bit more convergence in that I've been able to deploy Nokia gear and Arista gear in the same DC and manage them as one EVPN fabric with mostly identical API management to get there.
The short version of the above is there are still so many disparate weirdo systems precisely because the use cases of networking are well fit for wildly differentiated hardware every iteration which then drives having specialized software to go with it. Until that advantage goes away I don't see the networking space consolidating all that much.
> At the end of the day none of those differentiators are protectible, and they are fundamentally laundering free innovations done by a very small number of people, like Linux Kernel developer.
What does this use of laundering mean? The financial application of laundering does not make sense to me here (to make something procured illegally look like it was procured legally).
Networking equipment used by ISPs (which is Nokia's main revenue source) is not really comparable to consumer level stuff.
That said I left telecom (used to work for Huawei btw) in 2018, people were talking about hyper convergence and running network functions in K8s and shit. Not sure how much of that materialized.
> people were talking about hyper convergence and running network functions in K8s and shit. Not sure how much of that materialized.
Cilium is a hyper-converged networking solution on top of Kubernetes that you will read about and think, okay that's pretty cool. It's given away for free by Google.
Is it so far fetched to say that if there are already Kubernetes facades for the major cloud vendor's virtual networking solutions, which have been around forever, there will be similar stuff for "on premises" customers too?
I wonder what would drive that market down. Cell network equipment is an infrastructure investment, right? It seems they are predicting a pretty long-term demand drop in that case…
In the USA T-Mobile acquired Sprint and their 2496–2690 MHz licenses. They claim to cover 260 million people with 2.5 GHz channel 5G, and project 300 million by end of year. 2023 CAPEX came in at 9-10 billion, a 30% year over year decrease. https://www.telecomtv.com/content/access-evolution/t-mobile-...
Telcos have not yet realized any new revenue streams or reached new markets with 5G so they're taking a pause to better monetize their existing 5G investment. https://www.wsj.com/business/telecom/how-5g-changed-world-75.... Does every car, refrigerator, and VR headset really need its own cellular radio?
It may surprise some to know that many network operators buy backbone hardware platforms (DWDM transmission, cell carrier systems, etc) configure, operate, field-service, and even finance these lumps of custom hardware with their ASICS and line cards (plus standard CPUs and regular network interfaces) via the equipment vendor. They buy them with money loaned from the vendor (lower cost of capital), design and config the network with vendor people, and keep them running with people wearing Nokia, Huawei, Ericsson socks. These systems tend to have quite a long lifetime in the field.
I remember reading that the move to 5G would make cellular equipment more like software with upgrades and needing less hardware replacements to support newer tech.
Nokia is one of the top cellular/mobile backend hardware providers. 5G is turning out to be a lot more expensive than projected, the rollout has slowed, so equipment makers like Nokia are feeling the pain.
Interesting that NA sales are this far down. I'm not able to quantify the results (outside of the hashtag of #flipphone @ 850m views) of a recent TikTok trend, but at least anecdotally there had been a wave of users on the platform advocating the purchase of a "dumb phone".
I noticed this on YT as well, and tested this logged out to determine if this was a more tailored algorithm for me, or if there really was a trend advocating for these style of phones. It did appear for a time (around the summer of 2023) that an increase of this type of content were making the rounds.
It's possible that Nokia with it's limited marketing budget had not capitalized on the trend, and simply missed out thus the large decline.
For what it's worth, I every day carry a Nokia 6300, and have an iPhone 13 Mini as a backup.
I think that's a fair assessment, considering that one could have connections with everything from LinkedIn to trading platforms such as Robinhood, this wouldn't be an "end-all" solution.
It is up to the individual in assessing what their immediate needs are and what is considered a "luxury" that can be dropped or accessed another way.
Generally I found that I can live out the need to look at my portfolio, and delicate other needs to my laptop, which is a better tool in handling those tasks anyhow.
It hasn’t been banking that has been the issue so much as transport and logistics. No Uber. No Lyft. Have to write down cab numbers for random cities. Some airlines really don’t want to do paper boarding passes anymore. Some companies only have chat support.
Yeah admittedly this is a pain point. I ride subway/rail and use the Ventra app, which doesn't work with the 6300 due to the lack of NFC (my biggest use), cue the iPhone.
I wish we would get another 6300 with NFC, that would resolve the need to carry the iPhone. If I were less...ethical, I could just use my Flipper Zero and board that way.
It is not really that uncommon or unexpected of a point of confusion, there’s no need to be rude about it.
It was a very famous cellphone company for a while, and now cellphones are being sold under their brand. The point of the selling cellphones under that brand is to associate them with that company.
Given Nokia’s history in the welly business, it disappoints me that the headline writers keep failing to say they are giving 14,000 employees the boot.
