RAN stimulates renewal
Nokia has been appointed by Zain Jordan to supply 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN) equipment throughout Jordan in a multi-year project. After striking this deal, Zain could transform the country’s digital infrastructure and will seek partners to flesh out this framework with an array of exciting services that will explore every technical option that 5G offers them. The most immediate gift to the people of Jordan will be keener connectivity between the population, with much greater capacity for content providers to offer news and entertainment, while providing private enterprise for massive productivity improvements. A major part of the deployment is expected to be completed before the end of 2023.
Under the deal, Nokia will provide the latest generation of its AirScale Baseband systems, Massive MIMO radios and Remote Radio Head products. The equipment will be installed in at least 3,000 sites nationwide, all of which are now powered by ReefShark System on Chip (SoC) technology, which is currently the most energy efficient option available.
For the sake of business continuity Nokia will modernise Zain’s existing 4G infrastructure while building and testing its 5G network. Nokia has a long-standing partnership with Zain across several territories, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Nokia built Zain’s original foundations for long term evolution (LTE) in Jordan back in 2016. It used a three carrier LTE-Advanced network and the operator aggregated 25MHz across the 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2.6GHz bands. The new aggregation technique created speeds of up to 187.5 Mbps to the business and residential areas of Jeddah, which was state of the art metropolitan luxury for that time. Nokia’s pioneering work helped Zain Jordan build the first foundations of a smart city network in Jeddah.
Tommi Uitto, Nokia’s president of mobile networks, said Nokia’s engineers are delighted to be partnering with Zain Jordan again. This time, they are modernising with a complete Radio Access Network and introducing 5G technology to support the Jordanian Government’s digital transformation objectives. “The deployment of 5G [will] stimulate the incubation and growth of new technologies and industries,” said Uitto.