Nokia conducts Europe’s first Cloud RAN trial using In-Line acceleration in Elisa’s 5G network

Nokia and Elisa have successfully completed Europe's first Cloud RAN trial using In-Line acceleration in the latter's 5G network. The trial builds on Nokia's anyRAN - an open approach to building future-ready radio access networks together with an ecosystem of industry partners.

The trial utilized 100MHz cells on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz band) - the most common 5G capacity band globally - and 5G data calls were successfully executed with both test and commercial user devices.

The first 5G data calls in Cloud RAN marks a significant milestone for Elisa, which is pursuing network cloudification that delivers higher levels of network automation supporting the flexibility and agility of end-user service provisioning. The first commercial deployments are expected to take place over the next few years in Finland and will continue the cloudification evolution seen in core networks.

"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," said Markus Kinnunen, Vice President, Cloud Services, Elisa.

Nokia's anyRAN is designed to give mobile operators and enterprises more flexibility in their choice of cloud infrastructure software, hardware, and technology suppliers. It makes field-proven, energy-efficient and high-performance L1 In-Line acceleration available on Nokia's and any partner's cloud and server offerings.

"his 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.