In a still-developing story, Nokia has been excluded from a $14 billion Open RAN procurement round from AT&T, with arch-rival Ericsson securing the five-year contract at the expense of Nokia. AT&T has said it plans to use Open RAN to handle 70% of its traffic by 2026, which suggests quite a rapid upgrade cycle. This came after a week where rumors began trickling out that AT&T was considering replacing Nokia as a RAN supplier. Here, the speculation was that AT&T was unhappy with the performance of Nokia’s first generation ReefShark-powered mMIMO units. This was based on undisclosed sources, reported by EJL Wireless (more on that later). Nokia then published a somewhat cryptic comment on AT&T’s plans, before the news had…