Nokia today is the combination of the network businesses of Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent.
They have substantial operations in North America. T-Mobile uses primarily their hardware. Nokia still operates Bell Labs which came originally from AT&T via Lucent.
As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
So they’re more important to US infrastructure than might appear at first glance.
What do you imply with "atleast its a nato country"? Its not like finland have ever been anti-west, if this was your point. Nato alone does not imply pro-west (the US/trump leadership being the prime example)
I think the context is clear from what was written:
> As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
i.e. with the current US administration, a "Made in USA" solution to critical infrasctructure would likely be seen as ideal; and viewed through this lens, when the other options come from Sweden, Finland, South Korea, and China, Finland is probably the best option.
I didn't read any implied criticism of Finland.
How is Sweden worse than Finland? Considering they both are neighbors and have been a neutral country? (technically Sweden has been for longer).
>How is Sweden worse than Finland?
As a Finn, rather than bore you with a 2846 bullet point list, I'd say that technologically not a lot, but we do have a lot more to lose, so it is easier to bargain with our industry compared to Sweden's. Our population is not always big enough to compete head-to-head with some sectors Sweden is also a part of.
During the Cold War, Finland was officially neutral, but for pragmatic reasons leaned heavily towards the Soviets in foreign policy. There's even a word for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
That's not the whole story. Excluding the pro-Soviet fringes, Finland always wanted to be free of Russia. When Soviet Union fell, Finland moved significantly to the west and also started inching towards NATO.
But only the real NATO membership significantly diminished the country risk that foreign investors correctly perceived in Finland.
It's of course obvious to everyone now that there has been no reason to trust Russia. US investors have been resourceful enough to realize that investing in Finland carried a significant country risk due to Russia, even in times of relative peace.
That risk is lesser now thanks to NATO.
It's not about being anti-west, it's about the likelyhood of being invaded.
Unless they bought back Siemens into NSN, I think not.
I was part of the Nokia => NSN transition, and saw that S change back from Siemens into Solutions, with the money they got back from selling Nokia Mobile to Microsoft.
Ericsson is swedish Samsung is south korean I can agree that Huawei is chinese so that's a bad choice
But why is Ericsson(swedish), Samsung(south korean) not considered made in US in the sense that atleast south korea has strong relations with america iirc and also I just recently checked and it seems that sweden has also become a part of nato. So some of these can be just as good.
Although I still agree that Nokia might be important in general but I just wanted to point/question it out I suppose.
UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere.
Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US.
I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions
Nokia expanded into data center networks. Nokia sells optical data center interconnects.
They also plan to provide AI services in the Edge, that's why Nvidia invested.
are you saying nvidia invests into its customer so that the customer will buy more from nvidia?
sounds totally not a bubble.
Nvidia is Nokia customer in data center.
AI-RAN is partnership where Nvidia and Nokia will sell to telecoms and private 5G/6G networks.
Why are you forgetting about Cisco, Juniper (now HPE), and Arista - all of which are US companies?
Also, why is Nokia closer to the US than Ericsson?
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista make carrier hardware like cell phone radios and controllers and traditional telephone network switches?
While there's probably a little overlap in all of their product lines with Nokia (I mean Nokia makes simple ethernet switches so that carriers can buy all their gear from one vendor), most of those companies don't really compete in the same markets as Nokia
Cisco isn't selling into T-Mobile and AT&T's customer networks. Nokia isn't selling into JPMorgan's or Walmart's IP networks
Nokia also makes complex backbone carrier-grade network switches based on the Intellectual Property portfolio they acquired from Nortel.
That kind of stuff is the closest that they would come to compete with the others cited. They're all trying to get into datacenter gear, but Cisco specifically has gotten out of various levels of service provider network gear (they sold off all their cable network stuff, for example) which is where Nokia, Ericsson, etc all make their bread and butter
Cisco is still in the SP networking space, but they’ve been pushing heavily into datacenter and core routers generally (vs. edge which are more common in SP networks).
Granted, I only worked as a lowly dev in the Cisco SP routing team, and I haven’t been keeping up to speed with their work.
> As the other global options for network hardware
Hence my comment :)
Nokia does in fact compete with Cisco and the others, but less so than in the past.
Because context is important and we're discussing Nokia and/or Nvidia in this particular thread.
Re-read the comment I replied to. I wasn’t the one who brought up how Nokia is the closest company to the US for network hardware.
A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.
its based on TiMetra's TiMOS, a router startup alcatel acquired around 2013
>Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent
That's an amazing trove of IP!