In North America, we are now seeing some stabilization in demand as inventory positions have improved and we see the BEAD funding program progressing well, which we will still expect will start to benefit in the second-half and more meaningfully in 2025. In Europe, we see deployments remaining at a high level in markets with low penetration and we are seeing some mature markets starting to upgrade to XGS-PON and 25G PON. We are also seeing good momentum and growth opportunities this year in many of our other regions for fixed networks. Next, I wanted to highlight our Optical Networks business as we had a number of important launches in the quarter. New services and applications are driving significant increases in optical network capacity to the metro edge.
Therefore, we have expanded our optical portfolio to address these needs. In March, we announced the expansion of our pluggable coherent optics portfolio to now include 100, 400, and 800 gigabit per second transceivers. We also introduced new interface cards and chassis that bring scale and efficiency to metro edge applications that serve a diverse set of networking functions needed by our various customer types. In both IP and optical networking, we are clearly recognized as a market leader. This means we are uniquely positioned to serve the evolving needs of our customers in an unbiased way as they consider various converged IP optical network architecture alternatives. This truly differentiates us from the competition as typically they only have scale in either IP or optical.
I now wanted to provide a few words on our Mobile Networks business and our portfolio. Firstly, you can see in the charts, our products now deliver market leading throughput performance. A few years ago, we were behind on live networks performance for 5G. If you look at performance in live networks today, those cities that use our products are delivering better downlink performance and slightly better uplink performance than our competitors. With each generation of software release, we continue to improve on this. Secondly, we offer customers the greatest flexibility in terms of deployment for their networks. Operators are looking at opportunities to virtualize and optimize their network deployments. With our ramp approach, we offer the greatest flexibility in compute platform between different servers, CPUs and even cloud platforms for their baseband deployments, all while maintaining feature parity with our purpose-built baseband solutions.
Finally, we remain the most committed and engaged of the traditional equipment vendors to O-RAN. We are the largest contributor to developing the open interfaces with a transparent roadmap on product availability. We have completed operability with five different radio suppliers. This has also been helping us commercially with deals signed with Deutsche Telekom and NTT DOCOMO last year, along with the deal we signed in February with Rakuten. The next topic I wanted to talk about is how we are helping operators address their two biggest challenges. Automating their operations and reducing OpEx as network complexity grows and also how they can monetize their 5G networks. Let me explain how our technology enables this in a way that nobody else in the market is doing.
Regarding automation, we have the capability to drive zero-touch autonomous operations across all network domains. We manage autonomous operations across multi-vendor networks, meaning that we are providing this service management and orchestration in customer networks that combine multiple vendors rather than only orchestrating our own networks. This has been helping us to win against the competition and benefits from our position of having first-hand knowledge and deep expertise across RAN, transport, core, and the many different capabilities you see on the slide. On the monetization side, our holistic solution is what also enables network programmability and the ability for CSPs to expose their APIs to developers using our network as code platform.
This is a key point and we already have 11 operator agreements for our platform. To fully benefit from the emerging network APIs, CSPs need their operations to be fully automated because the API paradigm assumes an application interacts directly with the network in real time. In fact, we have customers who are purchasing our autonomous operations specifically to accelerate their API exposure strategy. Secure autonomous operations also underpin the ability to achieve network slicing at scale, which is another 5G monetization vehicle. To conclude, we have a highly differentiated solution for orchestration, which enables our customers to monetize their networks and run secure autonomous operations to address their biggest challenges in a way that none of our competitors can do.
I also wanted to highlight some partnerships that we announced in the quarter that will benefit both our mobile networks and cloud and network services businesses. At Mobile World Congress, we announced the strategic partnership with Dell. On the Nokia side, we will now adopt Dell as our preferred infrastructure partner for existing Nokia AirFrame customers, which will enable us to refocus our R&D efforts into areas where we can really differentiate as Nokia. Secondly, our private wireless solution, NDAC, or Nokia Digital Automation Cloud, will become Dell’s preferred private wireless platform for enterprise customers. And we can see this becoming a very powerful channel to further drive growth in private wireless. We also announced the partnership with Nvidia that will help us to broaden the compute platforms we support with our anyRAN solution that I talked about earlier for Cloud RAN deployments.
This will help us to accelerate the opportunities to bring AI capabilities into the RAN network. We will also partner with Nvidia on some elements of 6G research. And finally, in Nokia Technologies, as a quick reminder of some of the new growth areas we are now focusing on. We have been making strong progress in more developed areas like automotive and consumer electronics. You can see on the slide some of the recent deal examples here. We also see areas like IoT and multimedia as strong opportunities where we are in active negotiations, but the markets are still in the early stages of development. In multimedia, for example, we have a strong patent portfolio covering multiple technologies, including video compression, content delivery, content recommendation, and aspects related to hardware.
