Nokia SReXperts 25: Key Takeaways
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Technical Solutions Architect
Against the desert backdrop of Phoenix, Arizona, the 2025 Nokia SReXperts conference put a spotlight on Nokia's strategic vision in acquiring Infinera as well as its execution of several new product rollouts. The three days were far too packed for me to cover everything I learned, but here are my key takeaways…
Elephant in the Room: the Infinera Acquisition
Nokia's acquisition of Infinera was completed earlier this year, and it didn't take long for the integration of these two powerhouses to hit center stage.
The first plenary speaker of the conference was Ron Johnson, who has moved from his leadership role at Infinera into the role of VP and GM for the Optical Networks Division at Nokia. Prior to Infinera, Johnson spent 20+ years at Cisco, where he gained acclaim for his contributions to the optical networking industry as the Head of Product Management for Cisco's Optical Transport Business Unit. Having him be the first speaker at the conference emphasizes Nokia's commitment to the strategy that drove the Infinera acquisition: becoming the leading optical transport vendor in the world.
One of my key takeaways from his plenary session, which was further corroborated in subsequent sessions throughout the conference, is that Nokia plans to maintain its existing optical products as well as the incoming Infinera products. This approach is what most folks have been hoping for, as the two product lines are highly complementary.
Technical and tactical details of how the product integration will work were limited, but the overall strategy sets the tone for a new age of Nokia optical networking.
Unwrapping new routers
When it comes to new hardware products, SReXperts 2025 was a bit of a "catch-up" year for Nokia, as several products that had been announced over the last couple of years were finally unveiled in all their technical specification glory. Here's the quick run-down.
7705 SAR (2nd Generation)
At the 2024 SReXperts conference, Nokia announced that the 7705 Service Aggregation Router (SAR) product line would be getting new routers, and this year's conference delivered all the details.
The three routers being released are the SAR-1, which focuses on Ethernet edge applications, and the SAR-Mx / SAR-Hx combo, which provides the mission-critical interface capability that's made the 7705 SAR-8 so popular. Both the SAR-Mx and SAR-Hx are hardened for use in tough environments such as utility substations and mobile backhauls, with a 1 rack-unit design that incorporates built-in Ethernet ports and a linecard slot for TDM interfaces (or additional Ethernet). The primary difference between the two is that the Mx provides active cooling via side-to-side fan flow, while the Hx is passively cooled with increased venting and rear heat sinks.
These products provide about 50 Gbps of throughput, up from the 30 Gbps of the widely-deployed 1st-Generation SAR-8. They offer more advanced edge routing capabilities, particularly around encryption and synchronization. Overall, my impression is that these new routers nicely augment the existing 7705 SAR portfolio, cementing Nokia as the dominant force in mission-critical core routing.
7730 SXR
The 2023 SReXperts conference featured Nokia's executive-level announcement of the edge-focused 7730 Service Interconnect Router (SXR) and its custom FPcx forwarding engine. Further details on the technical specs of these routers were provided in 2024, and since then, the first generation of SXR-1 has started to ship.
The upgrade path from 7250 IXR-R6d to 7730 SXR-R6d is particularly interesting to me, as I've never seen a solution that allows you to upgrade a merchant-silicon chassis to custom-silicon. The Control Processing Input Output Modules (CPIOMs) that facilitate this upgrade are expected to begin shipping within the next year. This product family is one to pay attention to.
7250 IXR updates
The 7250 IXR product line received many exciting updates this year--some that were announced within the last few months and some that I only learned about for the first time in Phoenix.
First up, the 3rd generation of 7250 IXR-e series of edge access routers was announced a few months ago and covered in depth at the conference. These routers all offer line-rate MACsec on every port, full timing & synchronization capabilities, and environmental hardening. Here are the three variants:
The 7250 IXR-e3 is 1 rack-unit with 1.2 Tbps throughput that includes 2x 400G QSFP56-DD interfaces, along with 8x 100G SFP112 and 18x 25G SFP28 interfaces.
The 7250 IXR-e3c is 1 rack-unit with 400 Gbps throughput that includes 4x 100G QSFP28 interfaces, 8x 50G SFP56 and 16x 25G SFP28 interfaces.
The 7250 IXR-e3x is 2 rack-units with 2.4 Tbps throughput that includes 6x 400G QSFP56-DD interfaces, along with 16x 100G SFP112 and 15x 50G SFP56 interfaces. This is the first IXR-e that, by virtue of being more than 1 rack-unit, is not a "pizza box".
Nokia has also added three routers to the 2nd-generation of IXR-e, which are all network interface device (NID) variants known together as 7250 IXR-e2n. These boxes provide cost-efficient 1G and 10G service edge functionality, primarily as a customer premise device.
Lastly, the IXR-X product line gets a new router with the 7250 IXR-X4. This box is loaded with 32x 800G QSFP112-DD ports in 1 rack-unit. It lifts the ceiling of the IXR-X up significantly from the already-high-powered IXR-X3 and IXR-X3b.
…and AI, of course
No major conference would be complete nowadays without some type of AI excitement, and SReXperts 2025 did not disappoint. Nokia continues to deliver on both AI for Networking and Networking for AI constructs. AIOps within NSP is developing at a rapid pace, shifting us ever closer to an autonomous network capability. Meanwhile, Nokia's development of EDA (Event-Driven Automation) capabilities is helping to operationalize AI fabrics at hyperscale.
My personal favorite Nokia AI development is their new Documentation Assistant, which I got to demo a little bit in the conference exhibition. In the days following the conference, it was publicly launched on the Release 25.7 pages of SR-OS and SR-Linux.
Start by finding the "Ask AI" button in the bottom right of the page:
That will open up the following assistant box:
From here, you can ask for simple configuration assistance, like "How do I configure X?" or "What parameters can I adjust for Y?" My initial testing of these basic configuration prompts was fairly successful. Over the last year, I've been increasingly testing ChatGPT for this functionality, and I can safely say that the new Nokia tool is much more accurate (since its knowledge base is streamlined to focus on a specific software release).
Beyond the simple stuff, I was also impressed with how well it responded to prompts that seek an opinion or generative idea, such as the examples below. Note the extensive direct links provided as a reference.
If you're not yet using AI tools such as this one, I highly recommend you start test-driving them. Nokia joins Juniper (Marvis) as the only carrier-grade routing vendors with public-facing documentation AI assistants. To my knowledge, no other major vendor has this capability yet, although all the others (Cisco, Ciena, Arista, etc.) do have AI offerings that can be used within their proprietary management systems.
One key distinction between the Juniper and Nokia documentation assistants is that Juniper covers its entire documentation page (all software versions and product lines), whereas Nokia's is focused on a specific software release. Theoretically, this should mean that Juniper's will provide better contextual awareness ("breadth") while Nokia's will provide better precision with minimal hallucinations ("depth"). Either way, these tools drastically simplify the process of utilizing router documentation, and I'm excited to see them grow.