Open and Cloud RANs are the future of mobile networks.

In an era when politics and policies intertwine, businesses need to be extra vigilant to stay up and running. We have seen over the past how geopolitical situations can influence the market, businesses and investments on top of our natural competition, especially those relying on multiple vendors from multiple geographies. This is especially true in the case of telecom where the operators often get ‘locked-in’ with a technology vendor; and moving to another vendor or service becomes challenging.

O-RAN and vRAN (Cloud RAN) are gaining traction mainly on the ground that the open network enables operators to launch innovative services from their choice of vendors at lower TCO. Instead of sticking to proprietary equipment and solutions, operators can choose from the best-of-breed solutions available in the market, and launch flexible, tailored offerings to their customers, leading to competitive advantage as well as greater ARPU gains. 

Open and Cloud RANs are the future of mobile networks.

As per the recent report from Dell’Oro Group, O-RAN is expected to account for more than 10 percent of the overall RAN market by 2025, and the cumulative O-RAN investments – including hardware, software, and firmware excluding services – are projected to approach $10 B over the 2020-2025 forecast period. There are many new players now emerging in this space.

Nokia is fully committed to driving the broader adoption of O-RAN and Cloud RAN. We understand technology leadership will be crucial if we want to be the vendor of choice in the elements we offer and achieve far-fetching results. Nokia has a long history of supporting open and interoperable technologies and we are a substantial contributor to 3GPP for 3G, 4G and 5G.

Nokia is the first major global RAN vendor to join the Open RAN Policy Coalition. To drive O-RAN innovation, Nokia recently launched the Service Enablement Platform (SEP), which delivers radio network programmability, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) innovation across the O-RAN ecosystem. Nokia SEP adds a new intelligence layer to the RAN, which enables operators to create higher value-add use cases. 

Nokia SEP was launched with Nokia’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) xApps, including Advanced Traffic Steering and Anomaly Detection, which are currently in proof-of-concepts and trials with major CSPs.

Nokia has also collaborated with industry leaders like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions based on O-RAN and Cloud RAN technologies. Nokia has launched its 5G Cloud RAN solution with a virtualized CU in vRAN1.0 and the solution is now evolving to vRAN2.0 with virtualized DU.

With 5G, operators will have to deploy thousands of edge cloud sites to support the huge volume of data emerging from numerous applications and devices. To address their needs, Nokia has also announced Nokia Edge Automation, which removes the complexity of managing multiple cloud-based data centers through automatic processes such as remote site deployment, software updates and maintenance. This fully automated edge cloud solution is expected to save on CSP operating costs by approximately 30 percent.

To know more about how Nokia is enabling O-RAN and Cloud RAN solutions and use cases to solve key 5G scenarios for businesses worldwide, read further:

or ask to join our community: Nokia Edge Cloud Business Ecosystem

 

Author of the Article - Soma Sarkar

Open RAN (O-RAN) and Virtual RAN (vRAN): The open road to infinite possibilities

Soma is an experienced leader with strong expertise in leading large scale global products development. Thanks to her 25+ years of telecoms experience, she has developed a deep understanding of technology evolution, market trends and operator dynamics. Being an influential communicator, she specialized in building global teams with proven results delivering telecom products and solutions, achieving business results and driving customer satisfaction in complex and challenging environments . Her positive attitude, open mindset and excellent communication capabilities are the right combination to engage with many stakeholders to contribute to unlock new value creation in existing and new ecosystems.