Nokia and UAE-based telco du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), said they have deployed what they claim is the first commercial deployment of a 5G Cloud RAN solution in the Middle East and Africa region.
The 5G Cloud RAN site in Abu Dhabi – which uses Nokia’s AirScale massive MIMO radios operating in the 3.6 GHz band – is based on Nokia's anyRAN solution, including the vendor’s virtualized distributed units (vDU) and centralized units (vCU) that run on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers.
The solutions are also powered by Red Hat’s Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform OpenShift to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.
Nokia says that integrating Red Hat OpenShift enables du to better scale its 5G network footprint and quickly introduce new services, including AI, machine learning, and industry-specific applications in manufacturing, energy, and logistics.
“Leveraging 5G Cloud RAN will not only enhance our network's efficiency and flexibility but also enable us to explore new opportunities and services that can deliver genuine value to our customers and society at large,” said du CTO Saleem Alblooshi in a statement.
