Finland’s Elisa has joined a growing list of telcos embracing cloud RAN, as part of their evolution towards that mysterious concept of complete cloud nativeness. The telco, or at any rate its technology supplier Nokia, has put a stake in the ground by claiming Europe’s first commercial cloud RAN deployment – launching in December 2024, 14 months after completion of trials. As with some other operators, this is part of a cloudification process that began in the core, and has radiated out from there to the RAN. Cloud RAN has then become closely aligned with general cloudification and the rise in edge compute, so that the functions can be run closer to the radio heads and users as they encompass…