Nokia’s transfer of its FWA business to Inseego is a very interesting transaction on the telecom hardware market; not because the FWA market is weak, but because it reveals how difficult it has become to capture sustainable value in broadband CPE, and increasingly so in the FWA segment. The structure of the deal itself is striking: Nokia transfers a business representing roughly USD 200 million annualized revenue, while receiving around USD 15 million in Inseego equity and warrants. This is after investing an additional USD 10 million cash into Inseego, and committing to provide up to USD 38 million in EBITDA transition support during year one. At first glance, it almost looks like Nokia is paying to exit, but the broader context matters. The 5G FWA market remains very significant, with global demand expanding across new markets, and annual device deployments expected to remain above 20 million units in 2026. Some key operators continue to aggressively push FWA services as an alternative to fiber: Vodafone has just announced the launch of a 5G service in the UK with "full‑fibre like speeds". The initial boom of 5G fixed services was heavily driven by the US market, where operators such as Verizon and T-Mobile supported higher ASPs and premium devices, thus guaranteeing stronger orders and healthier margins to CPE vendors. At roughly USD 200 million FWA revenue in 2025, Nokia still captured around 8% of the segment’s global market share. But perspectives around ASP compression are driving them off the market. Deployment growth is heading towards Southern Asia, Africa and Latin America; meaning the industry becomes more volume-driven and more price-sensitive. This dynamic will strongly favor Asian vendors like Huawei, ZTE, TP-Link and other highly optimized low-cost manufacturing players. More generally, the CPE broadband market is increasingly polarized between high-scale low-cost hardware manufacturing on one side, and vendors trying to move higher into software, orchestration, cloud management and operator platforms on the other. As Inseego takes over Nokia’s 5G connectivity segment, it is betting on scale and software to get positioned as a differentiating platform before the market commoditizes further. The strategic question is no longer: “Will the FWA market grow?”, but rather: “Who will still be able to generate attractive margins from it?”
