Nokia and Elisa have announced the successful completion of what is claimed to be the first trial of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration. Announcing the development, the pair said the trial took place at Elisa’s headquarters in Finland, utilising the operator’s commercial 5G Standalone (SA) RAN and 5G Core, and was conducted in an over-the-air environment, using 100MHz cells on the n78 spectrum band (3.5GHz band). Data calls were reported to have been successfully performed with a selection of both test and commercial user devices in the trial.

Nokia has previously claimed that benefits of In-Line acceleration outweigh those of the alternative ‘Look-Aside’ deployment option for any commercial Cloud RAN deployment which is aiming for highest performance, lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and greatest flexibility.

Markus Kinnunen, Vice President, Cloud Services at Elisa, said of the trial: ‘This first call using Cloud RAN is a remarkable milestone on our cloudification journey. After already taking the first steps in cloudifying the telco network core,this transformation is now also expanding towards the access network.’