Claiming the high ground in virtualized and open RAN and core is a key element of Nokia’s turnaround plan (see separate item), and certainly of its messaging. To strengthen its claims, it has announced strategic alliances with all three webscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – at the same time.
Just as its large telco customers are increasingly joining forces with these cloud giants in order to enhance their economics and their enterprise proposition, so Nokia is doing the same. The webscale relationships will help it to scale up its cloud-based enterprise 5G business, while adding a new dimension of multicloud support for those business clients.
The new deals with all three companies are heavily focused on vRAN and open RAN, with a particular near term focus on private and enterprise cellular deployments. These relatively small-scale, greenfield 5G networks are set to be a rich seeding ground for new cloud-based and open RAN architectures, enabling them to gain maturity and proof points before they move into the even more demanding environment of 5G macro RANs.
Nokia can assert its power in the private cellular sector more effectively than in the telco market, where Ericsson and Huawei remain the big market makers in 5G. And it can help to address enterprise fears about being locked into a single public cloud platform, while enlisting the support of these three heavyweights to reach out to more potential clients and to strengthen its offering.
While each of the alliances is focused on enterprise 5G and open RAN, they have some differences of emphasis:
- The AWS partnership will “research and enable” virtualized RAN and open RAN “to support the development of new customer-focused” 5G services. The two partners aim to develop proofs of concept at Nokia’s sites to assess how Nokia RAN and edge solutions will best work with AWS’s hybrid edge compute platform, Outposts. To date, the main focus of Outposts partnerships in the 5G area has been with telcos such as Verizon, so this deal shows AWS extending its web – and highlights the way that Nokia may end up competing with its traditional customers for strategic partners and for enterprise business.
Projects will include 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”. That would support a common framework of tools across core and RAN and “solve the challenge of CI/CD, automation and network orchestration”, according to AWS.
- With Azure, Nokia will co-develop 4G and 5G private cellular use cases for enterprises, combining Nokia’s vRAN technologies with Azure cloud-based services. They will focus on applications that use a combination of vRAN, RAN Intelligent (RIC) and multi-access edge cloud (MEC) with the Azure Private Edge Zone, to support low latency services.
In the core, Nokia and Azure are likely to be competitors in the enterprise wireless space, since Microsoft acquired two virtualized core providers, Affirmed and Metaswitch, and Nokia offers its hosted Cloud Packet Core platform. But Microsoft has not extended its interest into RAN-as-a-service, and may look to develop such an offering in partnership with a RAN company rather than by acquiring its start-up.
- Google Cloud and Nokia will work together to develop new offerings that combine Nokia vRAN, open RAN and edge solutions with Google’s edge computing and applications platforms, particularly Anthos. Again, Google has announced several alliances with operators for its heavily edge-focused telecoms proposition, and in this instance, Nokia is potentially usurping the role of the operator. Google and Nokia previously announced a partnership to develop cloud-native 5G core capabilities for enterprises and operators.
The announcements came less than a week after Nokia announced the latest element in its open RAN offering, its service enablement platform (SEP). This integrates the functionality of the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), a key O-RAN specification whose development Nokia has been helping to drive, with multi-access edge computing (MEC).
This is an important combination, given that 5G RANs will be heavily dependent on edge compute to support very distributed vRAN architectures. Even wide area macro RANs will be disaggregated, with Layer 1 and 2 baseband functions that need to take place in near-real time being virtualized on distributed units, close to the cell site. And in the case of more localized enterprise, venue or city networks, the whole baseband, and potentially the packet core, may be deployed on an edge node to support low latency response for enterprise applications.
SEP also shows the significant trend to host various functions and applications on the same edge nodes, not just for efficient usage of that cloud infrastructure, but so they can tap into the same data and resources. So if the same compute platform hosts the RAN control and the MEC applications, the latter can be enriched by the network information that the RIC is using. As The Mobile Network points out, there is a continuity thread between this approach and Nokia’s development, almost a decade ago, of the Radio Applications Cloud Server (RACS) and Liquid Apps systems, which also used compute processing resource near the cell site to combine data and radio information.
The SEP can run on edge or far edge data centers and share infrastructure with vRAN and other virtualized network functions. It expects SEP to run on its own AirFrame Open Edge low-footprint edge nodes, though it can also run on other cloud infrastructure.
Nokia will launch the SEP with two of its own xApps (which run on the RIC) – Advanced Traffic Steering and Anomaly Detection. Both are currently in operator trials. It will also open the platform to third party xApps, an approach that also has some pedigree within Nokia. The Finnish company was early in opening its SON (self-optimizing network) system, acquired with Eden Rock, up to third party and operator-developed use cases and to provide its own software development tools. Now, Nokia is building on its strengths in SON to steal a march in RIC, which will take on some of the functions of SON within a 5G and open RAN environment.
And while some vendors and operators are moving away from SON and waiting for a next generation of automation technologies, Nokia is still winning deals there too. Orange has announced that it will use the company’s SON technology across all its RANs, regardless of their vendor, in all its markets. Arnaud Vamparys, SVP of radio networks and 5G at the operator, said: “The complexity of radio optimization is growing with 5G beamforming and Nokia’s flexible, automated and multivendor platform enables us to maintain our exemplary network quality and customer satisfaction in the 5G era.”
Nokia is not the only company with a RIC announcement this month. Mavenir also announced its own offering, together with a Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF). The NWDAF is a 3GPP Release 16 standard that provides analytics for core network functions and to OAM functions, such as cell congestion and UE experience analytics.