Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia has announced it has signed agreements with Microsoft, Amazon web services (AWS), and Google to develop new cloud-based 5G radio solutions with its radio access network (RNA) technology. The main aim of the partnerships is to develop new business cases.
Nokia, AWS
- Nokia has partnered with AWS to cooperate on making Nokia’s 5G virtual RAN and open RAN technologies work with AWS Outposts. Their joint trials will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities in Finland.
- AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility.
- Their joint work will also help service providers and enterprises to use Nokia RAN technologies with other AWS services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and AWS Local Zones.
Nokia, Microsoft
- Nokia also announced its partnership with Microsoft Azure for developing 4G and 5G private wireless solutions for enterprises.
- Nokia will be combining its mobile network technologies including open Radio Access Controller (RIC), RAN, and multi-access edge cloud with the Microsoft Azure Private Edge Zone.
- Azure Private Edge Zones are local extensions of the Microsoft Azure cloud. These extensions bring data processing close to the end-user, which is helpful for 5G-based applications that have heavy computing needs.
Nokia, Google
Nokia announced a third partnership with Google Cloud to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions. The two companies will marry Nokia’s RAN edge cloud technologies with Google Cloud’s edge computing platform and applications ecosystem.
The starting collaboration, which is already underway at Nokia’s headquarters, will integrate Nokia’s 5G virtualized distributed unit (vDU) and 5G virtualized centralized unit (vCU) with Google’s edge computing platform, running on Anthos. Nokia’s 5G standalone network with vCU and 5G core will also be tested on the Google Cloud Anthos platform.
