Nokia positions itself in the Ultra Ethernet race

The company conducted an end-to-end Ultra Ethernet test across its data center switch family.

Oct. 7, 2025

3 min read

Key Highlights

Nokia and Keysight tested traffic across Nokia 7220 and 7250 IXR platforms, demonstrating compatibility with Ultra Ethernet standards.
UEC Specification 1.0 introduces a high-performance, scalable Ethernet architecture designed for AI and HPC workloads, supporting features like RDMA and congestion control.
The collaboration showcases Nokia's commitment to providing AI-ready, UEC-compatible networking solutions supporting 800 GE interfaces and coexistence with existing protocols like RoCEv2.
Ultra Ethernet aims to meet the demands of real-time AI training and inference, requiring ultra-low latency and massive bandwidth in modern data centers.
This development enables global customers to access advanced, scalable AI data center networking solutions, paving the way for large-scale AI clusters with over 100K nodes.

Nokia, through a collaboration with Keysight Technologies, is marking its stake in the emerging Ultra Ethernet (UET) market, completing the testing of traffic across its data center switching platforms, including the Nokia 7220 Interconnect Router (IXR) and 7250 IXR.

The test demonstrates Nokia’s compatibility with and overall move to integrate Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) Specification 1.0 capabilities into its HPC/AI-ready networking portfolio.

What’s behind the drive for Ultra Ethernet is how AI is driving new methods to operate data centers.

While legacy data centers focused on providing power and space, today’s reality is pushing the need for real-time training and inference, which demand ultra-low latency, while even minor packet loss can derail training jobs and delay completion. When these new demands are combined with massive bandwidth requirements, these pressures are pushing existing data center networks to their limits.

“AI is changing the game when it comes to expected performance in AI data center networks,” said Rudy Hoebeke, Vice President, Software Product Management at Nokia.

UEC 1.0 emerges

Nokia’s work with Keysight comes with the emergence of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) Specification 1.0. In June, the UEC launched UEC Specification 1.0, an open Ethernet-based architecture and set of specifications to provide high-performance, scalable networking for modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads.

Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) Specification 1.0 defines this new UET layer to solve the complex problem set that HPC/AI creates. With Ethernet widely adopted across most data networks worldwide, it is a new protocol for modernizing AI data center networks with new standards, best practices, and architectures to support AI and HPC workloads.

“Networking technologies are evolving rapidly to meet the demands of large-scale AI clusters,” said Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and GM, Network Applications & Security business at Keysight. “Ultra Ethernet is one of the approaches under active development and is enabling the next generation scale-out fabrics that will power 100K+ AI clusters with innovation from PHY/Link layer to Transport and Application layer.”

The Nokia 7220 Interconnect Router (7220 IXR) for data center fabric.

Integrating AI-ready UEC

During the trial with Keysight, Nokia tested 800 GE interfaces with flows of UET traffic generated by Keysight’s AresONE 800GE-8P-QDD-M testing platform over a network that spanned all variants of the Nokia 7220 IXR-H5 and the Nokia 7250 IXR-10e platforms.

These Nokia switches were running the SR Linux Network Operating System (NOS).

As Nokia integrates UEC Specification 1.0 capabilities into the Nokia data center fabric solution for HPC/AI networks, global customers already have immediate commercial access to an AI-ready and UEC-compatible portfolio with support for Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) and Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN).

The current support for RoCEv2 was also tested at 800 GE flows in parallel on the same testbed, showcasing coexistence, openness, and flexibility.

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