Nokia and Elisa have announced the completion of the industry's first trial of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration. The successful trial was held at Elisa's headquarters in Finland, and it made use of the company's commercial 5G Standalone RAN and 5G Core.
The trial builds on Nokia’s anyRAN approach, which was developed to ensure the feature richness, energy efficiency and high performance of Cloud RAN compared to purpose-built RAN. Using In-Line layer 1 (L1) acceleration ensures each of these aspects while enabling flexibility to select between x86 and ARM-based ecosystems.
Using 100MHz cells on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz band), which is the world's most common 5G capacity band, the trial was conducted over the air. With a variety of test and commercial user devices, data calls were executed successfully. The trial used a Nokia reference design with a RedHat CaaS layer and an x86 server architecture. Nokia's anyRAN approach's feature performance enabled immediate interoperability with 5G user equipment and Elisa's 5G core network.
Elisa is pursuing network cloudification, which it sees as a critical area for sparking innovation and improving network service scalability. The first commercial deployments are expected in Finland over the next few years, continuing the cloudification evolution seen in core networks. Cloudification will result in higher levels of network automation, allowing for greater flexibility and agility in end-user service provisioning.
Nokia's anyRAN is an open approach to developing future-ready radio access networks in collaboration with an ecosystem of industry partners, unlocking a collaborative advantage. It's intended to give mobile operators and enterprises more options when it comes to cloud infrastructure software, hardware and technology providers. With Nokia, operators have the chance to transition to Hybrid RAN, in which deployments of Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN coexist to provide a reliable, high-quality performance.
Markus Kinnunen, vice president of cloud services at Elisa, said, “Elisa is a pioneer in automation and in introducing the benefits of network cloudification to Finnish customers. This first call using Cloud RAN is a remarkable milestone on our cloudification journey. After already taking the first steps in cloudifying the telco network core, this transformation is now also expanding towards the access network. The key benefits of Cloud RAN include the diverse network service platforms and scalability for different kinds of customer needs. In the future, we can provide more agile network services to our customers, whose network usage is transforming closer to the network edge.”
Mark Atkinson, head of RAN at Nokia, stated, “This important trial with our long-term partner, Elisa, confirms the effectiveness and maturity of Nokia’s anyRAN approach and our open Cloud RAN architecture powered by In-Line L1 acceleration. Unlike other suppliers, we commit to feature parity between Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN and we ensure that our customers can flexibly evolve to Cloud RAN with choices in Cloud infrastructure and data center hardware. Nokia’s approach to Cloud RAN means we will partner with communication service providers (CSPs) and enterprises to drive efficiency, innovation, openness and scale in their RAN evolution.”
