Bharti Airtel tries out Nokia's Cloud RAN tech

The telco has just completed a successful trial of Nokia's 5G non-standalone (NSA) Cloud RAN solution. Taking place on Airtel's commercial network, successful data calls were conducted using 3.5-GHz spectrum for 5G and 2100-MHz for 4G. Throughput topped out at 1.2 Gbps.

Airtel availed itself of Nokia's RAN software for virtualised distributed unit (vDU) and virtualised centralised unit (vCU), all running on x86 hardware with a container-as-a-service (CaaS) layer. The trial also used Nokia's L1 acceleration technology, which is based on inline acceleration rather than lookaside.

The whole endeavour is being done in the name of delivering superior customer experience through higher levels of service innovation, automation, flexibility, and the efficient scaling of resources.

It could also help Airtel in its quest to make 5G pay for itself.

To say that Indian telcos have been spending heavily on their 5G rollouts would be an understatement.

Airtel was first to market in October 2022, launching Airtel 5G Plus in eight cities. Within a year it had been launched in all 28 states and eight union territories. More recently, it has launched fixed-wireless access (FWA) services in 25 cities, running on its 5G standalone (SA) network.

In the 12 months leading up to this March, Airtel rolled out 43,100 5G sites and 55,982 kilometres of fibre. Its 5G subscriber base stands at nearly 72 million.

Efforts are now being channelled into earning a return.

Bids in India's most recent 5G spectrum auction fell well short of the reserve price. Rather than go all-out to bag as much spectrum as possible, operators opted instead to play itself, making targeted additions to their frequency holdings.

Capex has peaked, as evidenced by Nokia last week reporting a 69% year-on-year decline in revenue generated in India in Q2. And during Airtel's most recent investor call, CEO Gopal Vittal said he expected capex to decline in fiscal 2025.

On that same call, Vittal also stressed the need for so-called 'tariff repair' i.e. price rises.

Sure enough, Airtel along with market leader Reliance Jio have since announced price hikes for all 5G customers.

Justifying its decision, Airtel says monthly ARPU needs to be upwards of INR300 for telcos to maintain their financial health. At the end of March, ARPU was INR209, and monthly revenue per cell site was INR232,409, down from INR240,112 a year earlier.

"We believe that this level of ARPU will enable the substantial investments required in network technology and spectrum and offer a modest return on capital," the telco said.

Given this context, Airtel's Cloud RAN trial with Nokia is a logical step towards making its network operations as slick and efficient as possible.