Nokia AI-RAN platform targets 100 percent spectral efficiency gains by 2028

The shift toward AI-native networks represents a fundamental change in infrastructure where AI is the defining workload rather than a secondary feature. For streaming and telecommunications providers, this transition is critical to managing the massive surge in data traffic while adhering to the European Commission’s Digital Networks Act and Cybersecurity Act 2. By moving toward Level 4 autonomous networks, operators can reduce manual configuration hours for thousands of base stations into minutes. This architecture serves as a bridge to the 6G era, ensuring that current hardware investments remain commercially competitive against rising energy costs. Watch for the results of commercial 6G trials scheduled to begin later in 2026.

Nokia's AI-RAN platform sits within a broader autonomous network strategy that gained significant momentum at MWC 2026. Nokia and Ericsson announced a landmark collaboration to advance intelligent automation across purpose-built, cloud RAN, and Open RAN networks, with Ericsson joining Nokia's SMO Marketplace and Nokia becoming a member of Ericsson's rApp Ecosystem. The mutual ecosystem membership centers on the R1 interface through which rApps interact with the SMO, and both companies will make rApps available to CSPs on both platforms. SDxCentral reported that the collaboration was formally announced at MWC 2026, positioning it as a step toward Level 4 network autonomy across multivendor environments.

On the business and deployment side, Nokia has been integrating its Network as Code platform with cloud-native agentic AI capabilities. Nokia announced at MWC 2026 the integration of its Network as Code platform with Google Cloud's agentic AI stack, connecting over 70 partners and 20+ network APIs through Gemini models and standardized interaction protocols including A2A and MCP. The platform abstracts 5G core and RAN functions into standardized Northbound APIs aligned with CAMARA and GSMA Open Gateway specifications, enabling developers to access global mobile networks without navigating underlying infrastructure. This positions Nokia's AI-RAN work within a larger ecosystem play that spans from radio optimization to application-layer network programmability.

In the same autonomous network category, Nokia also demonstrated agentic AI-driven network slicing at MWC 2026. Nokia announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon AWS, Du, and Orange to debut an industry-first agentic AI-driven network slicing capability on a 5G SA core network, using Nokia's 5G AirScale base stations, MantaRay SMO, and Agentic AI modules alongside Amazon's Bedrock platform. The system ingests real-time telemetry including geospatial data, event triggers, and traffic patterns to dynamically orchestrate resources in response to fluctuating demand. Ericsson's competing approach at the same event involved partnering with Ookla to develop a specialized Speedtest version for measuring and validating 5G network slicing performance, with Ericsson's latest Mobility Report identifying 65 commercial network slicing services worldwide providing differentiated connectivity offerings.