Nokia claims to have launched the industry’s first commercial AI radio access network (AI-RAN) platform, promising to help carriers unlock “significantly more uplink and downlink capacity” from existing infrastructure.
Built using the Finnish firm’s network architecture and with a little support from Nvidia's computing power, Nokia’s AI-RAN platform will be offered via a software subscription model. Carriers can tap a new GPU-powered AirScale capacity plug-in unit for existing AirScale solutions, providing a streamlined upgrade path.
For operators wanting more flexibility, there’s an AI-RAN node that can be deployed as a standalone or in a clustered configuration. Alternatively, it can be offered alongside AirScale as a single logical base station. In addition, for those with cloud-native ambitions, Nokia’s offering a GPU-powered AI-RAN COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) server. Nokia's existing portfolio, meanwhile, will be “fully open RAN-compliant” so operators can “modernize at their own pace.”
Nokia CEO Justin Hotard said AI-RAN is “the biggest innovation in radio in decades” and claimed operators would see improved performance, better return on investment, and faster delivery of new services.
