ESPOO, Finland – Nokia today announced that it has signed go-to-market agreements with the world's leading cloud infrastructure and server providers giving mobile network operators and enterprises flexibility in their choice of hardware, cloud infrastructure, and data center solutions for running Cloud RAN. To support this Nokia has also announced the launch of anyRAN, a new concept to help mobile operators and enterprises extend their options for building and evolving their radio access networks. Nokia's approach supports the evolution of today's purpose-built networks to Cloud RAN and hybrid solutions, ensuring performance consistency across all network environments.

The Collaborative Advantage: Nokia launches anyRAN

Nokia anyRAN is designed to help mobile operators and enterprises extend their options for building and evolving their radio access networks. The software can run on any partner's Cloud and Server infrastructure in addition to Nokia AirScale base stations and Nokia AirFrame servers. This approach removes the complexity from deployments by allowing a mix of purpose-built, hybrid, and fully Cloud-based RAN solutions, enabling deep multi-level disaggregation at the Cloud Infrastructure layer and data center (server) hardware layer. Close collaboration with partners also ensures performance consistency of Cloud RAN with Nokia's field-proven purpose-built RAN.

Future-ready performance: Cloud RAN SmartNIC for anyRAN

Underpinning these high-performance solutions is the Nokia Cloud RAN SmartNIC, a Layer 1 (fronthaul) In-Line acceleration card that integrates seamlessly with all leading Cloud or server infrastructures. L1 acceleration needs specialized silicon with extreme computing capacity, which is beyond the capabilities of general-purpose processors. Nokia Cloud RAN SmartNIC uses dedicated and optimized silicon technology, which is more energy efficient and provides higher performance. Nokia and its partners have already successfully performed end-to-end 5G data calls (Layer 3 calls) in multi-vendor setups powered by Nokia's solution.

Nokia 5G Cloud RAN

While Nokia's AnyRAN solution offers deep multi-level vertical disaggregation, Nokia also continues to serve the mobile operator and enterprise market with its optimized Nokia AirFrame OpenEdge server family. Benefitting from the SmartNIC, the enhanced AirFrame Open Edge server delivers a 50 percent performance boost compared to the system shown at Mobile World Congress 2022. Nokia's solutions offer network performance consistency between purpose-built AirScale baseband and Cloud RAN and secures the best possible feature performance parity, with the fastest time-to-market for cloud/hybrid networks.

Read the full press release here.

Nokia