Nokia has signed go-to-market agreements with leading cloud infrastructure and server providers giving mobile network operators and enterprises flexibility options in terms of hardware, cloud infrastructure, and data center solutions for running Cloud RAN.
To support this Nokia has also announced the launch of AnyRAN, a new concept to help mobile operators and enterprises extend their options for building and evolving their radio access networks, the company said. Nokia’s approach supports the evolution of today’s purpose-built networks to Cloud RAN and hybrid solutions, ensuring performance consistency across all network environments. Sue Rudd, Director Networks and Service Platforms at TechInsights, said:
“As service providers evolve on the path towards disaggregated RAN, Nokia’s anyRAN offers them a solution with standard O-RAN fronthaul and 3GPP midhaul interfaces under seamless control that can operate across multiple Cloud partner data centers. Combined with acceleration from a new Layer 1 SMARTNIC and a ‘host neutral’ Container as a Service (CaaS) layer for DU and CU processing, this flexible open approach will allow operators to leverage Nokia’s powerful new ecosystem of platform and cloud partners to deliver very cost effective, high performance Cloud RAN service.”
Collaborative Advantage
Nokia anyRAN is designed to help mobile operators and enterprises extend their options for building and evolving their radio access networks. This approach claims to remove the complexity from deployments by allowing a mix of purpose-built, hybrid, and fully Cloud-based RAN solutions, enabling deep multi-level disaggregation at the Cloud Infrastructure layer and data center (server) hardware layer. Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said:
“The strength of our industry partnerships and the launch of anyRAN unlocks more choice and higher performance in Cloud RAN for our mobile network operator and enterprise customers. Server-based Cloud RAN will have to co-exist with purpose-built RAN in the short-to-medium term which calls for performance consistency and service continuity between the two. Together with our leading industry partners, we have made huge progress towards this goal by driving consistent performance across any partner’s Cloud Infrastructure or server hardware.”
The software can run on any partner’s Cloud and Server infrastructure in addition to Nokia AirScale base stations and Nokia AirFrame servers. While Nokia’s AnyRAN solution offers deep multi-level vertical disaggregation, Nokia also continues to serve the mobile operator and enterprise market with its optimized Nokia AirFrame OpenEdge server family.
