Bharti Airtel has completed its first 5G non-standalone (NSA) Cloud RAN trial in collaboration with its telecom equipment partner Nokia. This milestone supports Airtel India’s strategy to enhance customer experience through advanced technology investments.
The 5G NSA Cloud RAN project aims to foster service innovation, network automation, flexibility, and efficient resource scaling. Conducted over-the-air, the trial utilized the 3.5 GHz spectrum for 5G and 2100 MHz for 4G. Data calls achieved a throughput exceeding 1.2 Gbps using commercial user devices on Airtel’s commercial network.
The trial incorporated Nokia’s RAN Software for virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Centralized Unit (vCU), operating on x86 hardware with a Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) layer. Nokia’s L1 acceleration technology enhanced power efficiency and supported the anyRAN benefits, which leverage common RAN software alongside purpose-built network components.
This trial represents a pivotal step in Airtel India’s cloudification journey, aiming to bring scalability and agility to their network. Nokia’s anyRAN, an open approach for future-ready radio access networks, collaborates with industry partners to offer mobile operators and enterprises flexibility in their cloud infrastructure choices. This allows operators to adopt a hybrid RAN approach, integrating both Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN for consistent, high-quality performance.
Randeep Sekhon, Chief Technology Officer at Bharti Airtel, remarked, “This Cloud RAN trial is a significant step forward in our consistent efforts to integrate the latest and most efficient technologies into our network and leverage these to deliver brilliant customer experiences. This partnership with Nokia has enabled us to pioneer innovative solutions to upgrade our capabilities in 5G.”
Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, added, “Nokia’s approach to Cloud RAN means that our customers can flexibly evolve to Cloud RAN with choices in Cloud infrastructure and data center hardware. This will drive efficiency, innovation, openness, and scale in their RAN evolution.”
