Nokia Aims to Use Current Tech Transition to Strengthen Fixed Networks, Enter New Markets and Add AI Capabilities to its Core Technology

2026 Nokia Fixed Networks Industry Analyst Event, Yokohama, Japan, Sept. 15-17, 2026 — A select group of industry analysts gathered at The Westin in Yokohama, Japan, to hear from Nokia leaders, partners and customers about the company’s Fixed Networks business unit’s strategies, capabilities and opportunities. AI, hardware upgrades and the pivot toward hyperscaler opportunities were among the themes across the various executive presentations.

TBR perspective

The fixed networks market is at an inflection point, with three major technology transitions underway across access, Wi-Fi and network management. TR-069* (technical report 069) is evolving to TR-369 (technical report 369), the first major hardware refresh toward Wi-Fi 7 is underway, and the migration from GPON to XGS-PON, and selectively to 25G and 50G PON, is progressing as these technologies advance.
 
These shifts create a favorable window for Nokia to capture demand because hardware replacement is a logical time to pull through software modernization. Operators are simultaneously reconsidering how they manage the home, automate access networks and prepare fiber infrastructure for changing traffic patterns caused by AI adoption. Nokia is approaching this wave of progress with clearly defined road maps across relevant portfolio areas (e.g., Altiplano, Corteca, Quillion, PON) and is leveraging its hardware roots as the foundation for its AI story.
 
Nokia is positioning AI as another layer of value across its Fixed Networks portfolio, which spans access infrastructure, network control and home broadband. This approach is intentionally pragmatic, focused on applying AI where it can improve customer care, network operations, rollout efficiency and user experience. The strategy is less likely to produce a constant stream of attention-grabbing but relatively empty AI announcements. Instead, it gives Nokia a more credible path to converting AI from a feature into an operating model as customers become comfortable moving from AI-assisted workflows toward more autonomous operations.
 
Communication service providers (CSPs) remain the foundation of Nokia’s Fixed Networks customer base, but the company is increasingly applying PON economics and operational advantages to adjacent non-CSP environments, particularly hyperscalers. Out-of-band management (OOBM) is the clearest near-term example, with Nokia using co-creation and a highly configurable portfolio to establish credibility with hyperscalers before extending more standardized capabilities to neoscalers and others in the enterprise space.
 
In parallel, customer examples show that growth in the broader fixed networks market requires a variety of nuanced approaches. In some markets, Nokia can help customers modernize existing infrastructure, while in others, the opportunity depends on operators finding ways to make connectivity affordable and deployable for their customers through unconventional models.
 
Nokia is becoming more selective about the Fixed Networks opportunities it pursues, particularly in the hardware business, as it shifts away from deals where competitive pricing would push margins below targets. Rising component costs are also affecting customer purchasing decisions, constraining unit volumes or altering purchase timing. These factors resulted in top-line year-to-year declines for the Fixed Networks business in 2Q26.

Hyperscaler success first; neoscaler opportunity will build

Nokia is entering the hyperscaler space with PON capabilities for data center OOBM, using a co-creation approach and customer choice to establish itself in this market, leading with flexibility as its differentiator. The value proposition centers on characteristics that translate well from access networks into data centers, including density, space efficiency, lower cabling requirements, energy efficiency, and architectural flexibility. Nokia is also building choice into elements such as mount location, port count and interface mix, reflecting the highly customized demands of hyperscalers.
 
This opportunity is strategically meaningful as hyperscaler wins can provide a healthy financial complement and diversify the customer base, but CSPs will remain the core of the business. The more consequential long-term opportunity will be productizing what Nokia learns from hyperscaler engagements and carrying it into the broader data center market.
 
The flexibility Nokia is emphasizing for hyperscalers and neoscalers is well suited to these buyers, which have clearly defined architectural requirements. For many CSPs, excessive choice can create complexity when they look to Nokia for guidance on technology evolution, monetization and operations. As Nokia expands across customer types, its ability to package the right amount of flexibility for each segment will matter almost as much as the breadth of the portfolio itself.

AI road map emphasizes right-fit AI over AI-first positioning

Nokia is approaching AI from the broader customer-improvement perspective, layering capabilities within Altiplano and Corteca onto its existing hardware and software foundation to address operational pain points as customers modernize, leading with a platform-centric story. The road map spans two complementary domains, with Altiplano applying AI to network control, analysis and operations, and Corteca applying it to device management, customer care and the broadband experience.
 
Altiplano illustrates Nokia’s deliberate progression toward autonomy. Predictive AI and machine learning already support functions such as network analysis, capacity planning, churn reduction and KPI prediction. Agentic capabilities add a conversational interface and another set of virtual hands for network engineers. The longer-term direction moves toward AI completing complex end-to-end tasks under human supervision. Nokia characterized itself as between the human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop stages. This is an important distinction because it suggests the near-term objective is controlled operational augmentation, not unsupervised autonomy.
 
Nokia’s AI vision favors domain-grounded and deterministic approaches where possible, including smaller specialized models when they can provide better accuracy and token economics than larger general-purpose models. Model and deployment flexibility remain key to Nokia’s AI vision, enabling operators to use different models and combine cloud and on-premises inferences without requiring its users to conform to a single AI stack.
 
Corteca follows a similarly staged path in the home. Nokia is currently using AI to assist customer-care personnel, with the road map moving toward advanced analytics and quality-of-experience optimization. Home broadband challenges are not simply about faster Wi-Fi. Operators need visibility into what is occurring inside the home to manage Wi-Fi 7 experiences effectively, and the transition from TR-069 to TR-369 gives Nokia an opportunity to make Corteca a more central data and management layer as devices are refreshed, creating a natural opportunity to adopt modern software capabilities in kind.
 
For Corteca, this progression is about improving the broadband customer experience in a quantifiable way, such as net promoter score improvements, using greater visibility and AI-driven intelligence to help operators identify customers experiencing service issues faster and determine the appropriate action before those problems translate into customer dissatisfaction.
 
Taken together, Nokia’s approach to AI is appropriately conservative for a network domain where reliability and trust matter. The company seeks to make AI consumable, measurable and progressively more autonomous without separating it from the underlying network expertise. The risk is that a measured road map can appear less differentiated because, while AI has become pervasive in competitors’ fixed networks messaging, the level of substance behind that messaging varies considerably, with some announcements still emphasizing broad AI visions without clearly defining deployment maturity or measurable outcomes.
 
Nokia’s AI road map asserts that domain expertise, trustworthy data and deterministic execution will ultimately matter more than model size or the volume and frequency of AI messaging. Nokia also touts gradual operational evolution, with defined use cases to substantiate its AI vision.

Customer examples highlight need for creativity to expand the fixed networks market

Many of Nokia’s core fixed network markets are mature from a regional perspective, meaning growth from existing customers increasingly depends on upgrades, share shifts and expansion into adjacent use cases. The event’s customer examples reinforced that there is no universal path to additional fixed networks growth. In highly saturated markets, customers are selectively modernizing where fiber creates incremental value. Elsewhere, the central challenge is not technology performance but whether operators can make broadband economically accessible to households that remain unconnected.
 
Developing markets require a different kind of creativity. Customer discussions related to emerging markets highlighted affordability, geography, payment behavior and infrastructure resilience as constraints that hardware modernization cannot solve alone. Operators are experimenting with prepaid broadband, short billing periods, rapid fulfillment, alternative distribution and localized network designs to expand the potential customer base by designing the service around how people actually live, earn and pay.
 
Country- and city-specific variables such as weather, housing, population density, affordability and existing infrastructure determine whether the business case works. Nokia’s opportunity is therefore not only to provide more capable access technology, but to help operators combine technology, deployment architecture and business models in ways that make connectivity viable in places where a conventional fixed-broadband model may not. Multi-PON flexibility lets operators delay or stage technology choices, Corteca and Altiplano can improve the economics of operating and supporting networks, and automation can reduce the human effort required for deployment and assurance. The common thread is flexibility.

Conclusion

Nokia’s Fixed Networks strategy is increasingly defined by disciplined expansion. The company is using simultaneous technology transitions of access, Wi-Fi and network management to deepen its position with CSPs, applying PON expertise to hyperscaler and neoscaler data centers, and building AI into Altiplano and Corteca through a staged path toward greater autonomy. Across each initiative, the consistent message is flexibility. Multiple PON generations, multiple AI models and deployment options, and different architectures for different customer economics all reinforce this message.
 
Hyperscalers can absorb customization, neoscalers can standardize it, CSPs often need a more prescriptive road map, and emerging-market operators may need entirely new commercial models to make connectivity viable in their footprints. The next phase of Nokia’s Fixed Networks growth will therefore depend as much on understanding how each customer creates value as it does on advancing the underlying technology itself.