Singaporean telecommunications company StarHub has successfully trialed Southeast Asia’s first 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) in collaboration with Finnish telecommunications firm Nokia and American technology group Dell Technologies.

Nokia said in a statement on Wednesday that the cloud-based platform will enable StarHub to deliver new services to its enterprise customers and build an evolution path to advanced 5G and 6G.

The trial is in line with StarHub’s Cloud Infinity program that aims to help its customers accelerate their digital transformation journey.

According to the statement, the adoption of Cloud RAN is crucial for the future evolution of mobile networks.

It sets the foundation for AI-RAN infrastructure, supporting artificial intelligence (AI) workload management and allowing mobile network operators like StarHub to scale network resources more efficiently.

With Cloud RAN, StarHub can support use cases such as time-of-day services, ultra low-latency applications and services requiring dynamic throughput adaptations.

It will open up and allows StarHub to support new service request for the enterprise customers and ingest new revenue streams.

Nokia’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution seamlessly integrates with all leading cloud or server infrastructures.

As part of the trial, the firm’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution was used to place a carrier-grade call, demonstrating feature consistency with the existing purpose-built RAN.

Nokia MantaRay NM, its network management solution, ensured seamless interworking between the Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN.

Its virtualized distributed units (vDU) and centralized units (vCU) were running on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers.

StarHub also utilized Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by
Kubernetes, to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.

“StarHub is committed to delivering high-performing network and innovative services to our customers,” said Ayush Sharma, Chief Technology Officer at StarHub.

“This partnership will enhance our network’s performance, efficiency, and resilience, while future-proofing it for emerging technologies,

“It also marks a key step in our Cloud Infinity journey, strengthening our ability to deliver cloud-native services and drive the future of connectivity,” he added.

Andrew Vaz, Vice President, Product Management, Telecom Systems Business, Dell Technologies, said Dell is collaborating with Nokia in the Cloud RAN initiative to contribute to the future of radio technology and drive transformation for service providers such as StarHub.

“By combining our collective strengths, we can deliver a comprehensive and powerful Cloud RAN solution that improves efficiency, performance and scalability, making it easier for service providers to deploy Cloud RAN,” he added.

Jae Won, Senior Vice President and Head of APAC for Mobile Networks at Nokia, said with the firm’s industry-leading Cloud RAN solution, StarHub will be able to offer scalable services and augmented performance to delight its customers.

“Our anyRAN approach provides StarHub with true flexibility while ensuring feature and performance consistency across Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN,

“This is an essential step that enables StarHub to prepare its network for AI-RAN,” he added.

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