Nokia teamed with India’s Bharti Airtel to complete a non-standalone 5G cloud RAN trial in the country, in what the operator claimed represents a significant milestone in efforts to evolve its network.

The trial was conducted utilising 3.5GHz spectrum for 5G and 2100MHz for 4G, enabling data calls over Airtel’s commercial network with a throughput of more than 1.2Gb/s.

Airtel explained the trial supports its strategy of delivering a superior customer experience using high-performing networks, with the aim of delivering higher levels of service innovation, automation and to scale resources to support end users.

The company stated it has a wider ambition of bringing cloud networking benefits, such as scalability and agility, to its network.

As part of this strategy, Airtel struck a long-term partnership with Google Cloud in May to provide cloud and generative AI services to 1 million Indian enterprises.

For Nokia, the partnership extends its “anyRAN” open approach to building RAN networks to India. The vendor positions the approach as a way to allow operators to evolve networks to a hybrid RAN environment with both cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN deployments co-existing, providing more flexibility.

Randeep Sekhon, CTO at Airtel said the trial with Nokia was a significant step forward in “consistent efforts” to integrate “the latest and most efficient technologies in our network”.