No comms, no bombs: Nokia and LMT partner for 5G in Latvia

If a force cannot communicate, it will be unable to engage targets. No comms, no bombs. Radio-based comms can be jammed or targeted, they might lack the bandwidth to carry the type of data that forces demand. Now, Nokia and LMT from Latvia have partnered to bring 5G tech and its considerable bandwidth to the country’s defence.

In a move set to significantly enhance the operational capabilities of national and allied forces along NATO’s eastern frontier, Nokia and Latvia’s largest mobile operator, Latvijas Mobilais Telefons (LMT), have announced a strategic partnership to embed cutting-edge 5G radio technology into tactical defence systems.

LMT, a key technological partner for the Latvian defence sector, will integrate Nokia’s 5G hardware to create a secure, resilient, and high-capacity tactical communications system. The system is explicitly designed for dedicated military use cases in the region, including the vital NATO base at Ādaži, where LMT operates Europe’s first 5G military testbed.

• DSEI UK 2025: Motorola Solutions and Nokia collaborate on comms for UK MoD – Calibre Defence
• Project ASGARD; the British Army’s path to doubling lethality – Calibre Defence
• Royal Marines reach 2,000 MPU5 radios in service amidst UK comms woes – Calibre Defence   

The core objective is to facilitate real-time data exchange among diverse battlefield entities, including unmanned vehicles, sensors, and ground troops. As Giuseppe Targia, Head of Space and Defence at Nokia, noted, the joint solution supports military modernisation by enabling “faster decision-making, seamless communication, and the integration of advanced technologies across tactical environments.”

The partnership is a natural extension of existing cooperation, which has already yielded innovations such as a portable 5G tactical network utilising Nokia’s Banshee platform, the November 7th press release explains. LMT President Juris Binde emphasised that the deal enhances the “security, resilience, and operational readiness” of allied forces, ensuring mission success in demanding environments. This demonstrates a growing trend where commercial telecoms expertise is directly harnessed to solve complex national security challenges.

The 5G Advantage

The migration from previous mobile generations to 5G is not simply an incremental improvement in speed; it represents a foundational shift in network capability that is particularly valuable for military operations. 5G, or fifth-generation mobile network technology, is the latest global standard for wireless communication. It succeeds 4G/LTE and is engineered to provide not only much faster speeds but also vastly reduced latency and the capacity to handle an exponentially higher density of connected devices. A 5G network uses antennae with a very large number of send and receive ports. 

This allows the network to simultaneously beam signals to multiple users, dramatically increasing overall capacity and efficiency. It also uses high frequency bands for its signals, allowing more data to be carried, but over a shorter range than previous standards. 5G infrastructure also enables users to create a “network slice,” building a miniature network dedicated to a specific role. Altogether, this kind of technology should enable armed forces to share more data more reliably, which is seen as key to modern concepts of multi-domain integration. 

Calibre comment: All change

There is a growing push to integrate 5G and commercial technologies into military comms networks. This is in part a result of the increasing demand for bandwidth, which will challenge existing comms infrastructures, many of which entered service in the 2000s. They are often unable to carry large quantities of data between sensors and shooters, so new methods and technologies are needed to meet emerging concepts of operation. 

By Sam Cranny-Evans, published on November 11th, 2025. Credit for the lead image is Nokia.