The Finnish telecommunications company Elisa announced today that it has successfully completed the industry’s first trial of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration in partnership with Nokia. The trial took place at Elisa’s headquarters in Finland and utilised its commercial 5G Standalone RAN and 5G Core. Cloud RAN is a technology that allows mobile operators to deploy and manage their radio access networks (RANs) in the cloud. This offers a number of advantages over traditional RANs, including increased flexibility, agility, and scalability.
Over-the-Air Trial in Europe
The first trial in Europe took place in an over-the-air environment, utilising 100 MHz on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz), which is the most globally used 5G capacity band. Data calls were performed with both test and commercial user devices, following a reference design with a CaaS layer from RedHat and an x86 architecture.
anyRAN Approach
Nokia’s anyRAN approach, which was used in the trial, is designed to give mobile operators and enterprises more choice in their selection of cloud infrastructure software, hardware, and technology suppliers. It also enables operators to flexibly evolve to Hybrid RAN with both Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN deployments co-existing to deliver consistent, high-quality performance.
“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,” Elisa said.
“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,” said the company in a statement.
Network Cloudification
Elisa is said to be looking for network cloudification, which the company considers a key area for enhancing the scalability of network services. The first commercial deployments in Finland are expected to take place over the next few years and will continue the cloudification evolution seen in core networks, delivering higher levels of network automation to support the flexibility and agility of end-user service provisioning.
The successful trial of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration demonstrates the viability and effectiveness of Cloud RAN as a way to deploy and manage 5G networks.