Nokia, Elisa conduct Cloud RAN trial powered by in-line acceleration

Finland’s Nokia Friday claimed an industry first with telecom operator Elisa by conducting a Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) trial powered by in-line acceleration.

The successful trial took place at Elisa’s headquarters in Finland and utilised its commercial 5G Standalone RAN and 5G Core, said Nokia in a statement.

Nokia said the trial was underpinned by anyRAN approach, which ensures “feature richness, energy efficiency, and high performance of Cloud RAN” compared to purpose-built RAN. The vendor noted that using in-line layer 1 (L1) acceleration ensures each of these aspects while enabling flexibility to select between x86 and ARM-based ecosystems.

The trial took place in an over-the-air environment, utilising 100MHz cells on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz band).

The two companies successfully performed data calls with both test and commercial user devices. The trial followed a Nokia reference design with a CaaS layer from RedHat as well as an x86 server architecture.

“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,” said Markus Kinnunen, Vice President, Cloud Services, Elisa.

“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,” said Mark Atkinson, Head of RAN at Nokia.