Nokia and Bharti Airtel partnered to complete a 5G non-standalone Cloud RAN trial in India, a move for the operator to take a major step to equipping its network for the future.
Nokia said in a statement, the trial was conducted using 3.5GHz spectrum for 5G and 2,100MHz for 4G. Airtel’s commercial network achieved throughput of over 1.2Gbps.
Nokia explained the trial was a “significant milestone” in Airtel pushing its operations to the cloud and making its network more scalable and agile.
Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said: “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. This partnership with Nokia has enabled us to pioneer innovative solutions to upgrade our capabilities in 5G.”
Nokia President of Mobile Networks, Tommi Uitto added: “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. This will drive efficiency, innovation, openness, and scale in their RAN evolution.”
