Nokia said it has signed an agreement with AWS to research and enable Cloud RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN technologies to support the development of new customer-focused 5G solutions.
The collaboration, which will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities, aims to develop innovative proof of concepts (PoC) to explore and enable Cloud RAN and related technologies. Nokia is pursuing a strategy of collaborating with AWS to extend the reach of its Cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases.
The initiative will see engineering teams from both companies research how the combination of Nokia’s RAN (Radio Access Network), Open RAN, Cloud RAN and edge solutions can operate seamlessly with AWS Outposts. This collaboration will enable communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises with 5G connectivity to utilize AWS across the topology of the mobile network. Operators will be able to simplify the network virtualization and platform layers for the Core and RAN network functions by leveraging the agility and scalability of cloud. This will also enable enterprises to achieve their desired business outcomes for new 5G use cases developed by AWS ISV Partners.
AWS offers its customers a comprehensive suite of on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs on a pay-as-you-go basis. This collaboration will allow Nokia to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and other related services for automating network functionality, or end customer application deployment, scaling, and management.
Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation, DT
This collaboration which combines Nokia’s leadership in 5G Open RAN and Cloud RAN with AWS’s cloud platform capabilities and customer centricity can help to accelerate that journey.
Dave Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS
Our customers will benefit from different options to run 5G RAN using AWS Outposts with either Intel or ARM-based CPU choices, or third-party bare metal servers while using Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere.
