- Nokia surpasses 1,000 private network contracts milestone
- The vendor plans to adjust its private network strategy
- Nokia will continue selling private network small cells and solutions through partners
Nokia’s desire to focus on larger mission critical contracts hasn’t negatively affected its private network business yet.
“We've just been informed by Nokia that they reached 1,001 private network deployments by the end of Q4 2025,” James Bennett, director at SNS Telecom & IT told Fierce. This is a big number for private network deployments, and one which grew fast through 2025. As of Q2 2025, Nokia's tally stood at just over 760 private networks.
The news follows Nokia's decision to move its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) unit into a portfolio business position in late November 2025, with a view to potentially sell it off within 12 months. Nokia has said, however, it intends to continue to sell 4G and 5G small cell radios together with core systems through its channel partners, which include systems integrators and mobile network operator partners.
“Channel sales already account for 70% of Nokia’s private network deals,” SNS noted at the end of last year.
AvidThink principal Roy Chua said recently that Nokia’s move away from campus private networking could rattle its partners in the private network space. “Given their public stance around their campus assets, if I were a partner, the uncertainty might make me shy away from pushing those specific products and find alternatives,” Chua said.
Nokia is moving deeply into mission critical private networks, and these will be multi-million dollar contracts rather than the measly million dollar contracts that the ECE unit usually handles. That's because mission critical contracts use larger RAN and core equipment rather than the small cells in the campus space, and tend to serve large customers in the defense, public safety, railway and utility sectors.
It’s not clear how many of the thousand-plus private network contracts Nokia has signed are mission critical versus campus edge contracts.