RESEARCH PAPER: Nokia — Delivering Operational Cost Savings Through Autonomous Networks

By Will Townsend, Patrick Moorhead - January 15, 2025

Communications service providers (CSPs) face daunting economic and operational challenges. On one hand, capital expense levels and management complexity tied to next-generation mobile core, radio access network, and backhaul deployment continue to be significant despite the introduction of disaggregated infrastructure and Open RAN systems. The sky-high cost of licensed spectrum used for data transmission and service support also adds to this burden. On the other hand, operator monetization beyond access remains an elusive endeavor because of legacy constraints, persistent security challenges, and friction tied to a historical lack of developer tools to facilitate fixed, mobile, and converged network programmability.

AI and automation combined have great potential to help CSPs unlock significant operational cost savings, new monetization opportunities, and delightful subscriber experiences—and drive returns on upfront capital infrastructure investment. However, equally important are the strong analytics support, prescriptive telco security measures, and network programmability that are necessary for architecting and delivering fully intelligent autonomous networks at scale. The bar is high, and few network infrastructure providers have the depth and breadth of capabilities to deliver what is needed today.

Moor Insights & Strategy believes that Nokia is well positioned to deliver on the promise of intent-based autonomous networks designed to lower operational costs and unlock new monetization opportunities. The company has formulated a complete, end-to-end vision to address this opportunity. Consequently, Nokia’s approach to autonomous networks is supported by: significant investments in AI ops and generative AI as fundamental building blocks; a clear grasp of what is needed from an analytics perspective to refine operational controls; deep capabilities within its security portfolio to safeguard operators and end users; and the underlying orchestration required to facilitate developer innovation through network programmability.

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Table of Contents

Summary
AI’s Critical Role in Autonomy
The Importance of Analytics
Telco Security Considerations
Empowering Developer Innovation
Call to Action

Companies Cited:

Nokia

Will Townsend

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Will Townsend manages the networking and security practices for Moor Insights & Strategy focused on carrier infrastructure providers, carrier services, enterprise networking and security. He brings over 30 years of technology industry experience in a variety of product, marketing, channel, business development and sales roles to his advisory position.

Patrick Moorhead

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.