StarHub has completed a trial of a 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) in Singapore, enabling it to deliver AI and other services to enterprise customers and paving the way towards faster 5G Advanced and 6G networks in future.
The telecom operator says the technology lets it provide “time-of-day” services, ultra-low-latency applications and services requiring dynamic throughput adaptations. In also sets the stage for more workloads to be managed by AI in future, so it can scale network resources more efficiently.
Though new, Cloud RAN is attractive to telcos because of the efficiency and modularity that it offers. Unlike traditional RAN design, which has the baseband elements of a network situated at each base station, Cloud RAN centralises these functions on cloud servers.
Using less specialised hardware for these baseband functions also means lower costs over time. With some of the functions handled by software, through virtualisation, telcos get more flexibility in managing network resources.
The StarHub Cloud RAN test setup, built with Nokia and Dell, was connected to an existing traditional RAN during the trial. A carrier-grade call was made to demonstrate its consistency.
For this, Nokia’s virtualised distributed units and centralised units ran on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers. StarHub also used Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.
The trial marks a key step in StarHub’s transformation journey, strengthening its ability to deliver “cloud-native” and connectivity services, said its chief technology officer Ayush Sharma, in an announcement today.
Like other telcos in the region, it is looking to deploy more flexible infrastructure to meet customer demands for more flexibility and scalability.
Moving onto a Cloud RAN could give itself the agility needed to offer services that are more modular and target a broader set of customers.
