StarHub has successfully trialed Southeast Asia’s first 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) in collaboration with Nokia and Dell Technologies. The cloud-based platform will enable StarHub to deliver new services to its enterprise customers and move towards Advanced 5G and 6G.
A Cloud RAN network architecture helps operators overcome challenges they face — such as support for cloud platforms, multi-tenant services and faster processing — to support growing user needs.
StarHub said Cloud RAN is crucial for the future evolution of mobile networks and the deployment sets the foundation for an AI-RAN infrastructure that allows the operator to scale network resources more efficiently, as well as enable new AI technologies and services to be hosted over StarHub’s radio network.
With Cloud RAN, StarHub can offer use cases such as time-of-day services, ultra low-latency applications and services requiring dynamic throughput adaptations. StarHub is also able to support new service requests from enterprise customers and to bring in new revenue streams.
As part of the trial, Nokia’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution was successfully used to place carrier-grade calls. StarHub also used Red Hat OpenShift enterprise application platform to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.
The trial is in line with StarHub’s Cloud Infinity program that aims to help its customers accelerate their digital transformation journey. Nokia’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution will allow StarHub to seamlessly integrate with other leading cloud or server infrastructures.
