ESPOO, Finland — Nokia and Google Cloud announced today a new partnership in which the two companies will collaborate on cloud-based 5G radio solutions combining Nokia’s Radio Access Network (RAN), Open RAN and Cloud RAN (vRAN) with Google’s edge computing platform and applications ecosystem.
Building on a recent partnership announced in February, this new collaboration will deliver additional 5G monetization opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs), says Nokia’s press release.
Already underway at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, the initial collaboration between the two companies will focus on Cloud RAN and will integrate Nokia’s 5G vDU (virtualized distributed unit) and 5G vCU (virtualized centralized unit) with Google’s edge computing platform, running on Anthos. Nokia’s 5G standalone network with vCU and 5G core will also be tested on Google Cloud’s Anthos platform as a cloud-native deployment, says the press release.
As part of the collaboration, Nokia will also work to certify its Nokia AirFrame Open Edge hardware with Anthos. Nokia AirFrame Open Edge distributes computing capacity into the edge of the network and drives the implementation of Cloud RAN, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), as well as 5G, explains the release.
“Our service provider customers will benefit greatly from this collaboration with more choice and flexibility to efficiently deploy and orchestrate 5G networks. This will ultimately help our customers deliver 5G services on the network edge providing multiple options of cloud-based solutions paving the way forward,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia, in the release.
For more on Nokia’s partnership with Google Cloud, please click here.
Nokia made similar announcements today with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to also collaborate with those companies on cloud-based solutions to drive end-user 5G deployments.
