Nokia Partners With Big Three Cloud Providers for 5G Cloud Solutions
Nokia has announced partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud to develop 5G cloud solutions.
The Finnish company made the separate announcements on Monday, partnering with each company to tackle different areas for 5G improvements.
In the case of both AWS and Google Cloud, Nokia will be working on cloud-based 5G radio solutions. The partnerships will see Nokia work with both companies on Radio Access Network (RAN), Open RAN, Cloud RAN (vRAN) and edge technologies. Open RAN is designed to allow carriers to use interoperable hardware and software from multiple vendors, rather than being locked into vendor-specific solutions. Similarly, Cloud Ran allows carriers to manage their RAN functions using cloud computing principles and resources.
“This collaboration with Nokia will extend the reach of our industry-leading cloud technology to support our Telco and enterprise customers,” said Dave Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “We look forward to working closely on this collaboration and offer multiple deployment choices for customers to build 5G Cloud RAN and Open RAN solutions. 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. This will solve for the challenge of CI/CD, automation, and network orchestration by using a common framework of tools across Core and RAN.”
Meanwhile, Nokia is partnering with Microsoft to integrate its Cloud RAN technology into Microsoft Azure. Nokia will include its 5G RAN with Azure 4G/5G to better support enterprise customers.
“Microsoft believes in the importance of an open and interoperable ecosystem of solutions on the Azure carrier grade platform,” said Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure for Operators at Microsoft Corp. “Our collaboration with Nokia across multiple potential use cases, based on specific customer demand, will provide operators with choices on how the best adopt cloud technology in concert with their 5G updates to drive new revenue streams, reduce cost and future proof their network investment.”
