Nokia and Elisa successfully complete Europe’s first Cloud RAN trial powered by In-Line acceleration  

• Europe’s first Cloud RAN trial using In-Line acceleration realized in Elisa’s 5G network
• Successfully executed 5G data calls, with commercial 5G user equipment, confirming the feature richness and high performance of Nokia’s anyRAN approach
• Project confirms Nokia’s industry leadership in developing Cloud RAN market, which offers mobile operators more choice in building 5G networks
• First 5G data calls in Cloud RAN marks a significant milestone in Elisa's overall cloudification journey
• Supports Elisa’s ambition to pioneer bringing cloud networking benefits, such as scalability and agility, to Finnish customers with highly automated processes

13^th October 2023
Espoo, Finland – Nokia and Elisa today announced that they have successfully completed the industry’s first trial of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration. The successful trial took place at Elisa’s headquarters in Finland and utilized its commercial 5G Standalone RAN and 5G Core. The trial builds on Nokia’s anyRAN approach, which was introduced 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.

The trial took place in an over-the-air environment, utilizing 100MHz cells on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz band), which globally is the most common 5G capacity band. Data calls were successfully performed with a selection of 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. The feature performance delivered by Nokia’s anyRAN approach enabled immediate interoperability with 5G user equipment and Elisa’s 5G core network.

Elisa is pursuing network cloudification which it considers a key area in sparking innovation and enhancing the scalability of network services. 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. Cloudification will deliver higher levels of network automation supporting the flexibility and agility of end-user service provisioning.

Nokia’s anyRAN is an open approach to building future-ready radio access networks together with an ecosystem of industry partners, which unlocks a collaborative advantage. It’s designed to give mobile operators and enterprises more flexibility in their choice of cloud infrastructure software, hardware, and technology suppliers. With Nokia, operators have the opportunity to evolve to Hybrid RAN with both Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN deployments co-existing to deliver a consistent, high-quality performance.

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

Resources
Webpage: Nokia AirScale Cloud RAN
Webpage: Nokia anyRAN
Whitepaper: Cloud RAN: A Guide to Acceleration Options
Blog: In-Line architecture: bringing efficiency and performance to Cloud RAN
Blog: The collaborative advantage: Nokia and partners delivering best-in-class Cloud RAN solutions

About Nokia
At Nokia, we create technology that helps the world act together.

As a B2B technology innovation leader, we are pioneering networks that sense, think and act by leveraging our work across mobile, fixed and cloud networks. In addition, we create value with intellectual property and long-term research, led by the award-winning Nokia Bell Labs.

Service providers, enterprises and partners worldwide trust Nokia to deliver secure, reliable and sustainable networks today – and work with us to create the digital services and applications of the future.

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About Elisa

Elisa’s mission is a sustainable future through digitalisation. We are a pioneer in telecommunications and digital services, and in 5G. We provide sustainable solutions for over 2.8 million consumer, corporate and public administration customers in our core markets of Finland and Estonia, as well as in over 100 countries internationally. In Finland, Elisa is a market leader in telecommunications, and our international cooperation partners include e.g. Vodafone and Tele2. Elisa is listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki. In 2022, our revenue was EUR 2.1 billion and we employed 5,600 people in more than 20 countries. Elisa is a carbon-neutral company. elisa.com