Nokia scales AI-native RAN with Taiwan Mobile for 90% power efficiency
Nokia has partnered with Taiwan Mobile to deploy an AI-native radio access network (RAN) leveraging MantaRay SON for real-time automation and AirScale hardware for improved energy efficiency. The deployment enables advanced 5G features such as network slicing and RedCap to support industrial IoT and enterprise service-level agreements.
Key Takeaways
- MantaRay SON enables distributed AI at the base station layer to automate self-optimization and self-healing without human intervention.
- AirScale baseband hardware utilizes ReefShark SoCs to transition away from power-hungry FPGAs, achieving 90% lower energy use.
- The 5G-Advanced foundation adds support for network slicing and RedCap (Reduced Capability) to target industrial IoT and enterprise SLAs.
- AI for GeoStrategy establishes a resilient 'disaster infrastructure' layer capable of automatic traffic steering during seismic events or flooding.
- Nokia remains focused on platform-level differentiation as Juniper Research ranked it second to Ericsson in the global 2026 RAN market.
Why It Matters
Nokia’s move to embed AI inference directly into the radio layer marks a significant shift toward closed-loop autonomous networks, reducing the manual overhead that currently hampers localized optimization. For the streaming ecosystem, this architecture improves reliability in high-density or volatile environments while the modular hardware design offers a cost-effective path for carriers to scale capacity. By enabling network slicing down to the RAN level, Taiwan Mobile can now monetize differentiated quality-of-service tiers for data-heavy applications. The primary signal to track is whether these AI-driven efficiency gains allow Nokia to reclaim market share from Ericsson as operators face tightening capital expenditure cycles and rising GenAI uplink traffic.
Additional Context
The partnership arrives as telecom infrastructure vendors pivot toward software-led differentiation amid a stabilizing global RAN market. According to Juniper Research in June 2026, Ericsson holds the top position in the global RAN vendor leaderboard, followed by Nokia and Huawei. The study highlights that AI-RAN is becoming the primary growth engine, with operators prioritizing platforms that integrate cloud-native architectures and intelligent lifecycle management to lower total cost of ownership. In early 2026, Dell’Oro Group estimated that the worldwide RAN market stabilized at approximately $35 billion in 2025, recovering from a period where the sector lost nearly 20% of its value between 2022 and 2024. Technological development has accelerated at the edge to support these AI-native strategies. In March 2026, Nokia evolved its AirScale portfolio with the launch of Doksuri Remote Radio Heads, which improved power efficiency by 30% and signal-to-site footprint ratios by 25%. These units were specifically designed to meet the demands of AI-generated traffic patterns, which place heavier loads on the uplink compared to tradition streaming-heavy downlink patterns. Concurrently, Nokia launched an rApp Marketplace for its Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) platform in March 2026, encouraging third-party development of autonomous network applications. This strategy aligns with findings from Omdia in February 2026, which noted that while Huawei remains the global revenue leader due to its dominance in China, Nokia and Ericsson are increasingly competing on open, multi-vendor interoperability and energy-efficient baseband solutions to secure contracts in North America and Asia-Pacific.
Read full article at techtimes.com
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