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Bharti Airtel is India's largest CSP
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If deployed the solution will help Airtel enhance automation and build network scalability and flexibility
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Network improvement can potentially help Airtel bring down operational expenses and improve 5G monetization
India’s largest service provider, Bharti Airtel has completed the trial of Nokia’s 5G non-standalone (NSA) cloud radio access network (RAN) solution.
Nokia believes the deployment will help Airtel provide better service innovation, improved network automation, and flexibility and allow it to easily scale resources to support subscriber services.
“The trial marks a significant milestone in Airtel's overall cloudification journey and supports the operator’s ambition of bringing cloud networking benefits, such as scalability and agility, to their network,” said the Nokia press release.
However, it is not clear if the successful trial will lead to deployment in the network. Airtel is using Nokia’s AirScale RAN for 5G deployment. Ericsson and Samsung are the other 5G vendors for the service provider.
The service provider used Nokia’s RAN software for virtualized distributed unit (vDU) and virtualized centralized unit (vCU), running on x86 hardware with a container-as-a-service (CaaS) layer. The trial was carried out in the commercial networks and used 3.5GHz spectrum for 5G and 2100MHz for 4G. It achieved a throughput of over 1.2Gbps.
The trial also utilized Nokia’s L1 acceleration, which supports Nokia’s anyRAN approach that allows service providers to use hybrid network of Cloud RAN as well as purpose-built RAN.
Cloud RAN is more resource and cost efficient which enables service providers, like Airtel, to bring down operational expenses, thus allowing them faster 5G monetization.
“This successful 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,” says Randeep Sekhon, CTO at Bharti Airtel in the press release.
“This successful trial with our long-term partner, Bharti Airtel supports their ambitions for building scalable, agile and highly automated networks. 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,” says Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia.
Airtel was India’s first telco to launch 5G in October 2022. Unlike its competitor Reliance Jio, Airtel used 5G NSA to provide 5G services. In spite of Indian telcos building one of the fastest 5G networks in the world, they introduced 5G-specific tariffs only recently.
The service provider, who announced a tariff hike last month, has been stressing the need for “tariff repair” for quite some time. The company’s CEO mentioned reduced capex for this in the last earnings call, which would mean that vendors like Nokia would need to make more efforts to sell solutions and products to Airtel.