Nokia’s Rolf Werner on 5G Expansion, AI & Energy Efficiency

Rolf Werner heads Europe for Nokia’s Mobile Networks Business Group, where he is responsible for sales, marketing, business management and operations. 

“My job is to help drive Nokia’s growth and deepen our relationships with key European customers. One priority is also to support our growth ambitions into new market segments,” he explains. 

Rolf lives in Cologne with his family and has worked in the IC industry for more than 25 years. He has held various senior positions in his career, including Cognizant, T-Systems, Fujitsu and GlobalLogic. Rolf has a degree in Business Administration from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and a PhD in Business Administration from the University of East London. A part of Rolf’s success is ensuring balance.

“In my private life, I enjoy spending time walking my dog, early in the morning - if I am not on a business trip. On weekends I love watching my son play in competitive football matches,” Rolf says.

Here he tells us more about Nokia’s success - in sustainability, its partnerships and more. 

Leadership at Nokia involves leading by example and to keep learning

Mobile Networks (MN) is the largest of Nokia’s business groups, which represents approximately 44% of Nokia’s net sales and has roughly 35,000 employees. 

“Our mobile network portfolio includes RAN and MWR products, associated network management solutions, as well as network planning and optimisation, network deployment and technical support services,” explains Rolf. 

Nokia’s Mobile Networks is:

• #2 in 4G/5G RAN networks (excluding China)
• #1 in Microwave in the US 
• #3 globally
• #1 in network planning and optimisation. 

Apart from CSPs, the enterprise market is a big focus for Nokia, including for MN. 

“As Nokia, we have over 700 private wireless customers across all sectors – about 160 of them run 5G networks,” says Rolf. 

His philosophy is that leadership can only be as good as the team. Therefore, he always encourages his team to speak up, step up and create an atmosphere of trust and support. 

“I welcome new ideas and openness to new technologies that can improve or enhance our daily working lives such as developments in AI,” Rolf says. “The best thing I can do is to lead by example and encourage my team to keep learning and developing and not to rest on their laurels.”

Nokia’s energy-saving innovations and AI-powered solutions

Sustainability is extremely important to Nokia and an integral part of the design and purpose of future mobile networks. About 80% of the electricity consumed by a base station is consumed by radio units and about 20% by baseband. 

“Our radio and baseband portfolio ensures an optimum product fit to match the capacity and coverage needs of all deployment scenarios, which in turn minimises the consumed energy across all types of sites,” he says. “We are developing both software and hardware architectures to minimise power consumption in all traffic conditions.”

Nokia recently launched a new power saving mode called ‘extreme deep sleep’ that utilises Nokia’s latest generation AirScale radio architecture and ReefShark System-on-Chip chipsets. The mode detects when the network has low traffic and shuts down key parts of selected radio units’ hardware to save on energy cost. 

“We estimate that this can reduce radio unit consumption by a factor of eight. The solution will be introduced more broadly in the new generation of Nokia’s AirScale RAN portfolio. It leverages software in our Habrok radio units, as well as our MantaRay energy solution, which optimises the energy consumption of radio access networks with AI and ML,” Rolf explains. 

Nokia has also introduced a new Liquid-Cooled baseband hotel site solution, which enables up to 90% energy savings in baseband hotel cooling systems compared to active air cooling and up to 80% reduction in carbon emissions when the waste heat is used for other purposes like building heating. 

“Our innovative Virtual Power Plant Controller Software enables mobile network operators to monetise the idle base station backup batteries, typically unused because the power cuts are infrequent,” he says. “It enhances the stability of the electricity grid and allows operators to bid in power reserve markets, leveraging backup batteries for operating selected base station sites or selling energy back to the grid, which turns idle resources into profitable investments.”

In 2023, Nokia launched anyRAN to give customers more flexibility with Cloud RAN and has since made huge strides in making Cloud RAN a commercial reality by completing numerous pilots and trials with the wider industry. 

“Our anyRAN approach enables a fast transition to hybrid environments of Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN, ensuring consistent performance and interoperability with common software and In-Line acceleration architecture,” Rolf continues. “Forging industry partnerships is absolutely critical to the success of this initiative. The strength of our industry partnerships means we can drive efficiency, innovation, openness and scale by jointly delivering competitive advantage to operators and enterprises embracing Cloud RAN.”

Nokia is working closely and collaboratively with webscalers, hardware vendors and chipsets companies. 

“We have also extended our reach to private wireless by offering more choices on core with our industry partners,” he says. “High-quality and reliable RAN solutions are essential for enterprises to support their mission and business-critical applications and enable business growth. The move also aims to accelerate the adoption of 5G in the enterprise sector and support industries in their digital transformation.”

Rolf shared that he is looking forward to continuing to work closely with Nokia’s global customer base as their trusted partner and helping them to evolve their 5G networks. 

“This industry never stops and we must continue to push forward and deliver best-in-class technology and services,” Rold concludes. “In particular, we are working with our customers on various Cloud RAN and Open RAN pilots and trials. We are also looking at the evolution to 5G-Advanced networks.”

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