Ooredoo Group, Nokia ink multi-country deal covering 5G and more technologies

Ooredoo Group has selected Nokia in a multi-year deal across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia covering multiple technologies and services including 5G.

The partnership will see Nokia deploying equipment from its latest AirScale RAN portfolio on sites across North Africa and Southeast Asia, the Finnish company said in a press release on Monday.

This renewed contract is testimony to our growing partnership with Nokia to modernize and expand our network by rolling out world-class 4G and 5G services across North Africa and Southeast Asia. Thanks to Nokia's advanced technology, our customers will be able to experience faster speeds and enhanced response times as well as more bandwidth.

As part of the multi-country, five-year deal, Nokia will also provide its cloud-native Core software to give Ooredoo zero-touch automation capabilities that will drive greater scale and reliability. In addition, Nokia Cloud Packet Core, Voice Core, Registers, Policy Controller, Signaling and Cloud Platform will help Ooredoo introduce network slicing to launch and grow new services spanning health, smart cities, banking, transportation, and public safety more rapidly.

The deal also includes:

• Nokia's optical solutions - for expansion and applications flow for Ooredoo's state-of-the-art optical network without constraint
• Nokia's microwave transport - to enable seamless launching of new services where communities and businesses can rely on privacy, security, and near-instant response times
• digital deployment services supporting a faster time to market as well as technical support services

Commenting on this partnership, Pekka Lundmark, President and Chief Executive Officer at Nokia, said, "This new five-year deal will accelerate the benefits of Nokia's technology – including 5G – for consumers in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia and will enable businesses to digitalize and innovate with new services.