Nokia Called 'Token Certainty' the New Network Performance Standard

BARCELONA, March 5, 2026 — Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications equipment giant, said Wednesday that artificial intelligence has generated 1.3 trillion annual network sessions and 100 trillion tokens per day. The figures are driving a structural shift in how carriers must design infrastructure, the company said, away from stream-based traffic models and toward what it called "token certainty."

Justin Hotard, Nokia's president and chief executive, said the volume of AI traffic on mobile networks has reached 77 exabytes per month, with more than half carried over mobile connections. He said the figures signal that the industry is no longer at the start of an AI adoption curve but already deep into a scaling phase.

Hotard said traditional network performance metrics, including "five-nines" and "six-nines" connectivity standards, industry benchmarks measuring the percentage of time a network remains operational, would not be sufficient to handle AI workloads.