Openness in the networking industry

Nokia has announced a strategy to drive openness in all critical future product designs across the communications networking industry.

Openness will further improve research and development efficiency, speed up time-to-market and help the entire industry to offer consumers and business users new mobile services in the most cost-efficient manner.

On-going standardisation activities (3GPP, IETF) are complemented with a number of de facto standardisation initiatives to specify the internal interfaces of the key network elements. The aim is to create an open, competitive network-element module industry.

To support this development, Nokia also will share its core module technologies with other network vendors on an equal basis to its own systems business. One of the pivotal activities of this strategy is the Open IP Base Station Architecture initiative just announced.

Dr JT Bergqvist, senior vice president, Nokia Networks, said: "The challenge for network equipment vendors is that these new services require up to ten-fold increases in mobile bandwidth compared to current service offerings. This calls for a new level of efficiency in the communication networking infrastructure industry. IP technologies will enable new services, faster product development and lower cost, but IP alone will not be enough. Openness of internal interfaces is needed to realise the full potential of IP."