The French operator is also to trial Nokia’s Cloud RAN solution
Orange France has signed a four-year extension to its contract with Nokia to upgrade its 5G radio infrastructure with the Finnish vendor’s AirScale portfolio. The new deal covers south-east and western France. Orange is also to trial Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN solutions to assess the transition of its network towards Cloud RAN technology.
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Nokia will supply equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio which it says is O-RAN-compliant, and includes baseband solutions, Massive MIMO Habrok radios and the Pandion portfolio of frequency division duplex, multi-band, remote radio heads to cover a range of use cases and deployment scenarios.
The AirScale portfolio is based on Nokia’s ReefShark System-on-Chip technology. Nokia will also supply its radio network management, MantaRay NM, which “supports all radio and mobile core technologies”.
Pioneering drive
Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, CTO at Orange France, commented: “This new contract extension with Nokia and their industry-leading equipment portfolio will support our pioneering efforts to drive superior customer experience further, reduce our environmental footprint, and make our network as energy efficient as possible.”