In 2023, Nokia announced its anyRAN portfolio, which offers both proprietary RAN, as well as open RAN, technology to service providers. We didn’t hear much about anyRAN after its announcement. But at the recent MWC conference in Barcelona, Aji Ed, head of cloud RAN solutions at Nokia, said that during the past year Nokia worked on building “strong relationships” at the cloud RAN layer with vendors including Cisco, HPE, Dell, RedHat, Google, AWS, Microsoft and IBM.
Now, Nokia says it has completed global trials with its ecosystem of industry partners to enable its customers to build cloud RAN networks. This means that later this year, mobile operators and enterprises can work with Nokia to choose any server and cloud environment, including the containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) layer, without supplier lock-in.
Ed said that Nokia plans to go commercial with its cloud RAN starting in the second half of this year. But the offering will still include Nokia AirScale radios.
In this video he says most of Nokia’s customers are interested in open RAN, but since they already have networks that are built with proprietary Nokia technologies, “it is not going to be an immediate transition that is moving from one architecture purpose built to open RAN completely.”
Watch the video to hear more about what Ed had to say — and check out our other news from the big show here.