Fiber in the AI era: notes from Nokia's Fixed Networks analyst event

Recently, we had the opportunity to attend Nokia's Fixed Networks Global Analyst Event, held in Yokohama, Japan. We engaged with executives from Nokia’s Fixed Networks BU and four of its customers across Asia: J:COM, Singtel, Globe Telecom and Surge.  

The biggest takeaway in terms of messaging from the event was Nokia's headline pitch that “fiber is the network for the AI era”. This narrative was echoed by Nokia’s operator customers in the region, who also spoke with clarity and conviction that access technology is no longer the differentiator and that the goalposts have shifted to a focus on user experience, operations and economics. 

The next-gen PON debate is settling, mostly 

XGS-PON is increasingly the new baseline for fiber builds. Nokia counts around 200 XGS-PON deployments globally, alongside 23 at 25G, more than 20 trials of 50G and nine 100G demos. The real question is what comes after XGS. In Japan, NTT East's move to 25G PON has reshaped the market, while SoftBank has publicly committed to 50G PON. Singtel, meanwhile, is positioning 25G PON as a converged access layer, first for premium consumer tiers of 15-20 Gbps and then for managed enterprise services. 

Nokia's strategy has focused on giving their customers choice, rather than picking a specific technology. Nokia’s Quillion silicon and multi-PON optical modules let operators run GPON, XGS-PON and 25G or 50G PON off the same port. This is pragmatic in a market where the 25G versus 50G split is increasingly driven by regional or market-specific choices rather than technical reasons. Nokia’s customers have options and don’t have to postpone network expansion decisions while they wait for a winner between 25G and 50G.  

"Networks for AI" is still a narrative; "AI for networks" is delivering 

Nokia's argument is that AI agents are always on, bursty and upstream-heavy, and that agent-to-agent interactions will create a snowball effect on traffic. Peak capacity, rather than average throughput, becomes the metric that matters, and PON is well suited to handle it. However, the evidence today does not yet support the thesis that AI traffic will drive network upgrades, if AI traffic is growing at 20-25% from a low base. AI for network operations, on the other hand, is much further along. Nokia's framed the discussion on AI’s value for networks operations as roughly 70% from domain grounding and only 30% from the underlying LLM.  

Singtel provided the most detailed example of the event: a federated agent architecture in which service-layer "super-agents" orchestrate incident, change, assurance and fulfilment workflows by calling domain agents for RAN, core, transport and fixed access, all under shared governance and guardrails. The target is Level 4 autonomy and a "1:5:60" ambition: detect a fault within one minute, diagnose the problem in five and recover in 60. Notably, those domain agents span Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE and Nokia.  Several operators, like Singtel are building the orchestration layer themselves to achieve full end to end visibility and control, and vendors will plug into it rather than own it. 

Nokia’s customers focused on user experience and innovative business models 

Nokia’s customers at the event gave a few presentations that highlighted the case for a shift in strategy for differentiation. Value is increasingly shifting towards user experience and innovative business models (especially in emerging Asian markets), and away from the access technology.   

Singtel offered a compelling data point on the importance of user experience by pointing out that around 80% of customer care calls relate to Wi-Fi. They were able to reduce call-in rates by around 40% by adopting the TR-369 (USP) standard with Nokia's Corteca controller. That is a tangible operational win, and a reminder that the customer judges the network by the user experience. 

J:COM, Japan's largest cable operator with 5.8 million subscriber homes, made a similar point more bluntly: fiber is no longer a differentiator, and competitive advantage is shifting to customer experience. Its access strategy is refreshingly pragmatic. HFC and FTTH will coexist, with remote OLTs at existing node sites enabling an incremental, demand-led fiber build.  

Globe Telecom (Philippines) and Surge Indonesia offered a reminder that the hardest broadband problems are commercial, not technical. Globe is changing how broadband is bought, with prepaid fiber at 999 pesos, no paperwork, flexible validity plans and Wi-Fi ordered and installed via GrabMart within two hours. This is Globe’s effort to expand their addressable market by tapping into local buying patterns. Surge Indonesia has been using fiber laid along Indonesia's railway corridors, with OLTs housed in 591 stations, and reports adoption of around 62% on its FTTH footprint against an industry average closer to 20%. Capex per home connected is roughly US$42, with payback of 10-14 months on a Rp100,000 (US$5.60) entry plan. With 1H 2026 EBITDA margins above 60%, this is not a social inclusion program but a genuinely differentiated business model. 

Final thoughts 

Nokia's fixed business looks in good shape, with a broad PON portfolio, its own silicon, and a credible AI operations story. Nokia has also been diversifying beyond its core telecoms customer segments, with a first hyperscaler win for PON-based out-of-band management for Meta’s datacenters. Nokia cited its work with more than a thousand enterprise customers on optical LAN, more than twenty neutral host customers, and a AI fiber sending deal with FiberCorp.  

Of course, there are near-term challenges, with memory-driven cost inflation and the risk that operators reduce or postpone orders as a result. The bigger takeaway, though, is that value in fixed broadband is migrating up the stack: into the home, into operations and into the business model itself. Nokia's software, in the form of Altiplano and Corteca, will be a key competitive differentiator at a challenging time for broadband service expansion globally.