Nokia, in collaboration with stc, has achieved a regional first with the successful commercial deployment of 5G Non-Standalone NSA Cloud RAN in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. This marks a significant milestone in stc's journey to integrate Cloud RAN in its commercial network, paving the way for future network technologies such as 6G. By leveraging Nokia's Cloud RAN capabilities, stc is targeting to unlock the benefits of RAN cloudification, including network automation, programmability, architecture agility and flexibility as well as enabling the introduction of new services and use cases.
Nokia's market-leading Cloud RAN solution powers stc's deployment in Makkah, built on an advanced edge cloud topology. Leveraging Nokia's anyRAN partner ecosystem, the solution integrates Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers, Red Hat OpenShift, and Nokia 7250 IXR Switches to deliver superior scalability, flexibility and operational efficiency. The anyRAN approach ensures seamless interoperability and consistency between Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN, supporting stc's strategy for a hybrid, future-proof network architecture.
In the commercial site cluster, Massive MIMO radios on the n78 band were connected to Nokia's virtual Distributed Units vDU and Nokia's virtual Centralized Units vCU that were installed in distributed and centralized deployments at edge and far-edge data centers, minimizing latency by moving content processing closer to end users. Performance tests demonstrated consistency with Nokia's best-in-class purpose-built RAN, validating the maturity and reliability of Cloud RAN for commercial use.
