It’s been a very busy week for Nokia. Following an LTE FWA announcement involving Nigeria and an FTTH announcement involving the Philippines, there’s now 4G expansion news from Azerbaijan.
Nokia has announced that it has expanded the 4G footprint of the Azerbaijan-based mobile operator Azercell Telecom with the installation of its AirScale 4G base stations at more than 1,400 sites across the country.
The company says its AirScale Radio Access solutions will provide Azercell with high-speed mobile connectivity to cater for increased demand as well as providing a clear migration path in the future. Nokia is the sole supplier in this deal and will replace the former 4G provider. It also plans to develop the network further.
This deal is apparently the first large-scale regional deployment of 4G services outside the capital city Baku. Azercell will utilize Nokia’s Single RAN solution, an end-to-end solution that offers huge capacity scaling and what Nokia describes as market-leading latency. It will reduce complexity, increase cost efficiencies and enable a smooth upgrade path in the future via a software update.
Azercell will also utilize Nokia Software’s NetAct Cloud network management system, which is cloud-agnostic and meets customer demands for software-only delivery. NetAct manages both radio and core networks and provides applications for fault management, configuration management, network and administration management, performance management and security management.
The deal includes Nokia’s services for network design, deployment, and optimization. Installation began at the end of 2018 and was completed in July 2020.
Azercell is the largest operator in Azerbaijan and has prioritized increasing the geographic coverage of 4G with plans to roll out across the whole country, including semi-urban and rural regions. Azercell is also planning to deploy low-power, wide-area NB-IoT services.
