Nokia has announced the successful completion of its first 5G non-standalone (NSA) Cloud RAN trial in collaboration with Bharti Airtel, the leading telecom giant of India.
The trial, conducted over-the-air utilising 3.5 GHz spectrum for 5G and 2100 MHz for 4G, achieved data throughput exceeding 1.2 Gbps with commercial user devices on Airtel’s operational network. Nokia’s state-of-the-art RAN Software, deployed on virtualised Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualised Centralized Unit (vCU) running on x86 hardware with a Container as a Service (CaaS) layer, helped achieve this performance.
Additionally, Nokia’s L1 acceleration technology played a crucial role in optimising power efficiency, reinforcing the efficiency of Nokia’s anyRAN strategy. This approach enables seamless integration of Cloud RAN with purpose-built RAN deployments, ensuring consistent high-quality performance across the hybrid network infrastructure, says the company.
Randeep Sekhon, chief technology Officer at Bharti Airtel, expressed enthusiasm about the successful trial, emphasising its role in advancing Airtel’s network capabilities: “This successful Cloud RAN trial is a significant step forward in our consistent efforts to integrate the latest and most efficient technologies into our network and leverage these to deliver brilliant customer experiences.”
Tommi Uitto, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia, highlighted the broader implications of the trial for network evolution: “This successful trial with our long-term partner, Bharti Airtel, supports their ambitions for building scalable, agile and highly automated networks. Nokia’s approach to Cloud RAN means that our customers can flexibly evolve to Cloud RAN with choices in Cloud infrastructure and data center hardware. This will drive efficiency, innovation, openness, and scale in their RAN evolution.”
