Nokia and du have deployed the first commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution in the Middle East and Africa region, in Abu Dhabi, supporting the UAE’s evolving digital requirements and advanced use cases, including AI, machine learning, and industry-specific applications in manufacturing, energy and logistics.
The commercial 5G Cloud RAN site deployed in Abu Dhabi based on Nokia’s flexible anyRAN approach included Nokia’s virtualised distributed units (vDU) and Centralised Units (vCU) running on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers, and Red Hat OpenShift powered by Kubernetes, to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.
By integrating with Red Hat OpenShift, service providers such as du have the option to better scale their 5G network footprint and quickly introduce new services. They also utilised Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO Radios operating in the 3,6GHz (n78) spectrum frequency, using 5G Standalone architecture.
Nokia’s commercial Cloud RAN solution can co-exist with purpose-built networks in hybrid environments and evolve to full cloud-native networks, supporting the rising demand for RAN cloudification. Common Nokia RAN software ensures feature and performance consistency of Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN across the entire commercial footprint.
Saleem Alblooshi, chief technology officer (CTO) of du, comments: “Our collaboration with Nokia represents a major leap forward in du’s mission to deliver exceptional network performance and innovative services. 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.”