WAVExperts 2026: Nokia Wavence and the Road Ahead for Microwave Transport
Key takeaways from Nokia's WAVExperts 2026 in Vimercate, Italy: why transmit power matters, E-band absorbing short-haul spectrum, D-band's long road to deployment, and what it means for regional Queensland networks.
On 13–14 October 2026 I travelled to Nokia's Technology Center in Vimercate, just outside Milan, for WAVExperts 2026, Nokia's flagship event built entirely around its Wavence microwave point-to-point radio portfolio. The two-day program covered Nokia's state of the business, new product launches, long-term technology and spectrum outlook, AI-driven network efficiency, customer use cases, lab demos, and hands-on time with Wavence hardware.
For MarchNet, which designs and deploys microwave networks across regional and remote Queensland, WAVExperts was a chance to see where Nokia's roadmap is heading, and what it means for how we design networks over the next several years. Four engineering themes stood out.
It All Comes Down to Total Transmit Power
If there was one engineering thread running through every session, it was transmit power. For long-haul links and E-band radios especially, available transmit power is the single biggest lever on link budget: it decides how far a hop can reach, how much rain-fade margin is in hand, and ultimately whether a given microwave band can do the job fibre can't.
Nokia's own long-haul portfolio is built squarely around this idea, pitched as delivering "high transmission power and spectrum flexibility, supporting up to 10 Gbps throughput over very long distances," with its full-outdoor radios marketed as having "the highest output power and system gain available" in the category (Nokia, Microwave transport). The pattern repeated across the roadmap was simple: every incremental gain in power-amplifier efficiency gets reinvested straight back into either more reach or more capacity, often both.
E-Band Is Quietly Finishing Off the Short-Haul Bands
The clearest market signal from WAVExperts was how far E-band (71–86 GHz) has already eaten into traditional short-haul spectrum. 38 GHz, long the workhorse band for dense short-haul links, is now almost completely absorbed by E-band deployments, and the same migration is under way, more slowly, across the other legacy short-haul bands.
The logic is straightforward: E-band offers far more contiguous bandwidth and, in most jurisdictions, lighter-touch licensing, and Nokia's E-band radios are now pitched as "ultra-high-performance 20 Gbps wireless backhaul" for exactly the urban infill role 38 GHz used to fill (Nokia, Microwave transport). The trade-off has always been rain fade over distance, and Nokia pointed to field-proven E-band performance under heavy rainfall as a direct answer to that concern. For operators still planning short-haul upgrades around legacy bands, the direction of travel is hard to miss.
D-Band: Proven in the Lab, Priced Out of the Field (For Now)
The most forward-looking material at WAVExperts was D-band (roughly 130–175 GHz). Nokia's trials and proof-of-concept work in this band are effectively complete, and the technology looks genuinely deployment-ready from an engineering standpoint: it's the economics that aren't there yet.
The underlying innovation is "radio on glass": Nokia Bell Labs packages the D-band transceiver electronics on a low-loss glass interposer rather than a conventional substrate, which is what makes a highly integrated, spectrally efficient D-band radio possible at all (Nokia Bell Labs, D-Band Radio-on-Glass Module). That research has since moved into live demonstrations on Nokia's commercial Wavence Ultra-Broadband Transceiver platform, most recently full-duplex D-band transport with dual polarisation added for a claimed fourfold capacity gain, targeting up to 50 Gbps aggregate on a single 2+2 GHz channel (Nokia, November 2025). Nokia itself is now pointing to first commercial D-band deployments between 2028 and 2030.
What made this relevant beyond D-band itself is the knock-on effect: the power-amplifier and packaging work being proven out in these trials is the same technology base that, over roughly the next decade, will push total transmit power higher in the E-band and long-haul radios we're deploying today. D-band isn't just a future band in its own right: it's effectively R&D for the next generation of the bands already in the field.
Where the Growth Is: E-Band and Multi-Band
The commercial picture backs this up. After a soft 2024, the point-to-point microwave transmission market is forecast to return to steady growth through 2028 on the back of continued 5G rollouts, and within that market, E/V-band systems are the standout, with Dell'Oro forecasting E/V-band shipments growing at roughly a 16% five-year CAGR, well ahead of the market as a whole (Dell'Oro Group, July 2026). Multi-band radios, which pair E-band capacity with a lower band's reach and rain-fade resilience in a single hop, were the other clear growth category discussed at WAVExperts, letting operators capture E-band throughput without giving up the fade margin of a traditional band.
For a regional operator, that combination is the practical takeaway: E-band and multi-band are where both the vendor investment and the market demand are heading.
Milan, Hospitality, and a Rooftop Over the Duomo
Technical content aside, Nokia and co-sponsor Tongyu didn't hold back on the hospitality. We were well looked after throughout: properly wined and dined, with the coffee quality standing out even by Milanese standards.
The highlight was a Nokia- and Tongyu-sponsored evening at Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II: a sunset rooftop Highline tour overlooking the Duomo, and Milan's skyline, followed by dinner. It's a reminder that, for all the talk of GHz, dBm and link budgets, the microwave industry still runs on relationships built over a good meal and a great view.
What This Means for MarchNet
Put together, the four themes point in one direction: more transmit power, delivered more efficiently, pushing E-band and multi-band further into roles that short-haul bands used to fill, with D-band quietly doing the R&D for what comes after that. For a network built across regional and remote Queensland, where fibre often isn't an option and every extra dB of link margin matters, that's a roadmap worth tracking closely.
Thanks to Nokia and Tongyu for hosting WAVExperts 2026, and to everyone we caught up with in Vimercate and Milan. Looking forward to seeing how much of this roadmap has turned into shipping product by the next one.