What’s up with… Nokia, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, T-Mobile US

• Nokia takes €300m profits hit from FX, tariffs
• AT&T boasts big beautiful tax savings
• Comcast and Charter turn to T-Mobile US for B2B mobile push

In today’s industry news roundup: Currency exchange fluctuations and tariffs force Nokia to issue a profits warning for the full year; AT&T is to pump billions more into its fibre access network infrastructure as it celebrates massive tax savings from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; Comcast and Charter have hooked up with T-Mobile US, and not existing MVNO partner Verizon, for B2B mobile services; and much more!

Nokia’s share price slumped by 8.5% to €3.76 during Wednesday trading on the Helsinki stock exchange after the vendor issued a profit warning late on Tuesday, blaming foreign exchange rate fluctuations (a weaker dollar) and “tariff headwinds” that are “outside its control”. While the vendor says its “underlying business performed as expected” during the first six months of the year, the foreign exchange shifts and the impact of trade tariffs have forced the company to lower its operating profit outlook for the full year to €1.6bn-2.1bn from its previous outlook of €1.9bn-€2.4bn), a difference of €300m. The main impact has come from the change in the exchange rate between the euro and the US dollar: When Nokia made its initial full year calculations in January, the €/$ exchange rate was 1.04, but its new calculation is based on a rate of 1.17. That shift has had a €230m negative impact on its operating profit projection, while the “tariff landscape” is expected to have a negative impact this year of between €50m and €80m. Nokia is set to publish its second quarter 2025 results during the morning of 24 July but ahead of that publication it noted that it expects to report revenues of €4.55bn and an operating profit of €300m. Nokia, of course, won’t be alone in taking this kind of hit: Other European vendors that do a lot of business in the US will also be impacted by the same “headwinds”, especially if the US does impose 30% tariffs on EU goods from 1 August, as has been threatened.   

AT&T expects to benefit from cash tax savings worth between $6.5bn and $8bn during the 2025-2027 period, relative to the financial guidance it provided at its 2024 investor day, due to the impact of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The telco expects savings of $1.5bn-$2bn this year, followed by $2.5bn-$3bn in 2026 and again in 2027. The news came as the operator reported its second quarter financial results. AT&T says it plans to invest $3.5bn of those expected savings into its network infrastructure to “accelerate its fibre internet build-out to a pace of 4 million locations per year, a run-rate it expects to achieve by the end of 2026.” The telco added: “As a result of this increased pace of organic fibre deployment, AT&T expects that by the end of 2030 it will reach approximately 50 million customer locations with its in-region fibre network,” and more than 60 million fibre locations once it includes: the Lumen Technologies Mass Markets fibre broadband network assets it has agreed to acquire for $5.75bn (and which it plans to expand); its Gigapower joint venture with Blackrock; and agreements with open access fibre broadband network providers. As for the rest of the savings, AT&T plans to pump $1.5bn into its employee pension plan by the end of 2026 and use the remaining savings for “financial flexibility to support additional strategic investments, incremental capital returns and debt repayment, among other potential uses.” For the second quarter, AT&T reported communications services revenues of $29.7bn, up by 3.9% year on year, and communications services operating profits of $7.07bn, up by 0.9%. 

US cable operator giants Comcast and Charter Communications have struck a joint (and exclusive) MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) deal with T-Mobile US to offer mobile services to their enterprise customers. Mobile services will be offered by Charter and Comcast to US businesses under the Spectrum Mobile for Business and Comcast Business Mobile brands, respectively, noted T-Mobile US in this announcement. Edward Zimmermann, president of Comcast Business, stated: “Comcast Business delivers advanced, converged solutions to business customers by uniting the scale of our nationwide WiFi network, gig-plus speeds, and the integration of top-tier 5G mobile capabilities. Our capital-light partnership with T-Mobile further strengthens our growth strategy in wireless for business customers and provides them exceptional value.” Danny Bowman, executive VP for Product at Charter Communications, added: “Spectrum Mobile for Business offers a truly converged connectivity experience, combining gig-powered internet and superior WiFi service with a premium 5G mobile network. This partnership with T-Mobile will allow us to rapidly and cost-effectively bring even more value to our Spectrum Mobile business customers.” The deal is great news for the wholesale unit of T-Mobile US, which is not shy in telling the world how advanced its 5G network is, but something of a blow to Verizon, which already provides MVNO services to Comcast and Charter for their consumer mobile service offerings – Xfinity Mobile (8.1 million customers) and Spectrum Mobile (10.4 million customers), respectively. The cable companies have stressed that their “existing long-term MVNO partnership will continue to support residential and current business customers”. That’s a small crumb of comfort for Verizon, which will now face even fiercer competition in the enterprise mobile services space from the cable giants. Of course, AT&T and T-Mobile US will also face similar competitive pressure in the B2B market, but at least T-Mobile US will be reaping the rewards of the MVNO fees from Comcast and Charter.  

Research firm Omdia has taken a look at what Asia’s cloud service providers – including SK Telecom and China’s cloud providers such as Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei and Tencent – are doing in order to meet the rising demand for AI inference from the region’s enterprise sector. By examining which GPUs (graphics processing units), AI accelerators and AI-optimised CPUs (central processing units) these companies have deployed, and the current status of their own AI models and custom chip projects, as well as their AI service and pricing plans, it has come up with an interesting take on the sector. “Despite heavy stockpiling of Nvidia H800 and H20 GPUs during 2024 and early 2025, prior to the imposition of US export controls, these high-performance chips are difficult to find in Chinese cloud services, suggesting they are primarily used for the hyperscalers’ own model development projects,” noted Omdia in this announcement.  At the same time, “there are relatively few options that use any of the Chinese AI chip projects; exceptions include Baidu’s on-premises cloud products and some Huawei Cloud services, although they remain limited,” it added. Omdia principal analyst Alexander Harrowell noted: “The real triumph in Chinese semiconductors has been CPUs rather than accelerators. Chinese Arm-based CPUs are clearly in production at scale and are usually optimised for parallel workloads in a way like Amazon Web Services’ Graviton series. Products such as Alibaba’s YiTian 710 offer an economically attractive solution for serving the current generation of small AI models such as Alibaba Qwen3 in the enterprise, where the user base is relatively small and workload diversity is high,” he added. Where “modern GPUs” are deployed, “the strongest offering Omdia found was the GPU-as-a-service product SK Telecom is building in partnership with Lambda Labs,” the research firm noted.  

Philippines operator Globe Telecom has committed to power 3,000 cell sites in Metro Manila and Calabarzon with 100% renewable power in a move that will lead to the consumption of 80 million kWh of clean electricity and cut its greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 5.5 million kilograms, reports Southeast Asia Infrastructure. 

Research firm Mobile Experts has taken a broad look at the impact of AI on mobile networks and concluded that “AI assistants and AR [augmented reality] will strain the 5G network, but AI-for-RAN optimization [the use of AI to enhance the performance and efficiency of radio access networks] will create more capacity than consumer applications will use, at least through 2030. The wild card is in automated use of AI for video analysis, in automotive, drone, and industrial applications.” Joe Madden, principal analyst at Mobile Experts, stated: "New applications are coming to your smartphone, taking advantage of on-device AI processing capability. We have been able to identify which apps will run on your phone, and which ones will require network connectivity.  The frame rates, resolution, and persistence of video inputs will have a profound impact on the 5G network," added Madden.

– The staff, TelecomTV