$Nokia Oyj (NOK.US)$ shares are off 8% Tuesday afternoon as questions loom if $T-Mobile US (TMUS.US)$ will discontinue working with the company.
First $AT&T (T.US)$, now Nokia?
Analyst Earl Lum, of EJL Wireless Research, believes there is a good chance that Nokia will lose T-Mobile's business too.
To be clear, neither company has said that's happening. Moreover, officials from both Nokia and T-Mobile have repeatedly stated their intention to continue to work together.
But Lum's opinion on the topic counts. He's the analyst who first reported that AT&T would remove Nokia from its network just days before the operator announced its historic $14 billion Nokia rip-and-replace program with Ericsson.
Verizon started a similar anti-Nokia operation just three years before AT&T.
"Is there a real possibility of a strike-out (0-3 in US baseball terms) for Nokia in the United States mobile market? Our sources and channel checks say potentially and most likely, yes," Lum wrote on social media Tuesday. "And if EJL Wireless Research was T-Mobile USA, we would from a purely technical perspective."
Officials from T-Mobile and Nokia didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Lum's post.
The reasoning
In his post, Lum makes a lengthy and detailed argument for T-Mobile to remove Nokia from its network due to almost ten years of technical shortcomings in Nokia's equipment for T-Mobile. Lum specifically pointed to the weight, power and cooling inadequacies of Nokia's equipment, including its latest radio offerings supporting Massive MIMO technology.
Nokia officials have disputed those criticisms.
Lum wrote that, in 2022, T-Mobile replaced Nokia's equipment with Ericsson's equipment across most of Florida, all of Georgia, and in smaller parts of South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama in an effort dubbed "project excalibur."
"So, a swap out has already occurred once in the very recent past," Lum wrote.
"In the end, MAYBE we are wrong (highly unlikely) and it will not happen and T-Mobile USA decides to pardon Nokia from death row at the 11th hour but we believe that the single vendor Cloud/AI RAN Thanksgiving Turkey dinner/offer with all of the fixings and unlimited open bar that Ericsson has prepared and put on the table may be too good of a deal to pass up," Lum wrote.
Lum is a longtime analyst in the US wireless industry, known for disassembling vendors' products to investigate their innards. He was profiled in a Wall Street Journal article in 2021.
