Nokia, StarHub and Dell Technologies successfully complete Southeast Asia’s first 5G Cloud RAN trial

The successful trial demonstrates the flexibility and openness of Nokia’s anyRAN approach, combining the expertise of Nokia and Dell for the 5G Cloud RAN solution

Singapore’s StarHub has successfully trialed Southeast Asia’s first 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) in collaboration with Nokia and Dell Technologies. The collaboration resonates with StarHub’s Cloud Infinity objective to leverage cloud infrastructure to offer unparallel digital experience to enterprise customers.

Specifically, the collaboration will see StarHub leverage the cloud-based platform to deliver new services to its enterprise customers and build an evolution path to Advanced 5G and 6G. Nokia has been

With businesses looking to deploy more AI workloads, Cloud RAN sets the foundation for AI-RAN infrastructure, supporting AI workload management and allowing mobile network operators like StarHub to scale network resources more efficiently. Not only can StarHub support use cases such as time-of-day services, ultra-low-latency applications and services requiring dynamic throughput adaptations with Cloud RAN, but the telco will also be able to support new service request for the enterprise customers and ingest new revenue streams.

Nokia’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution seamlessly integrates with all leading cloud or server infrastructures. As part of the trial, Nokia’s commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution was used to place a carrier-grade call, demonstrating feature consistency with the existing purpose-built RAN. Nokia MantaRay NM, our network management solution, ensured seamless interworking between the Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN. Nokia’s virtualized Distributed Units (vDU) and Centralized Units (vCU) were running on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers. StarHub also utilized Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.

According to Ayush Sharma, Chief Technology Officer at StarHub, the telco company is committed to delivering high-performing network and innovative services to its customers.

“This partnership will enhance our network’s performance, efficiency, and resilience, while future-proofing it for emerging technologies. It also marks a key step in our Cloud Infinity journey, strengthening our ability to deliver cloud-native services and drive the future of connectivity,” said Sharma.

For Andrew Vaz, Vice President, Product Management, Telecom Systems Business, Dell Technologies, the collaboration with Nokia in the Cloud RAN initiative contributes to the future of radio technology and drive transformation for service providers such as StarHub.

“By combining our collective strengths, we can deliver a comprehensive and powerful Cloud RAN solution that improves efficiency, performance and scalability, making it easier for service providers to deploy Cloud RAN,” said Vaz.

“With our industry-leading Cloud RAN solution, StarHub will be able to offer scalable services and augmented performance to delight its customers. Our anyRAN approach provides StarHub with true flexibility while ensuring feature and performance consistency across Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN. This is an essential step that enables StarHub to prepare its network for AI-RAN,” added Jae Won, Senior Vice President and Head of APAC for Mobile Networks at Nokia.

The completion of the first 5G Cloud RAN trial in Southeast Asia follows Nokia’s announcement with industry partners at MWC2025. During the conference, Nokia outlined the advances made in the deployment and optimization of revolutionary AI-powered RAN as well as the future architecture for AI-RAN.

These joint efforts will lay the foundations for developing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business models for CSPs, which helps them unlock new monetization opportunities by offering scalable computing infrastructure and capabilities for processing AI and other services. Under its anyRAN approach, Nokia is evolving Cloud RAN solutions to include AI computing in the shared infrastructure to maximize resource efficiency for operators.

Apart from the trial with StarHub, Nokia has also achieved significant growth in the APAC region. Recently, Vodafone Idea selected Nokia to expand its optical transport network in India, while in New Zealand 2degrees reached a six-year deal to use the vendor’s cloud-native communication suite. Bharti Airtel also deployed Nokia’s converged package core and fixed wireless access offering to integrate 5G and 4G services into a single set of servers in India. The core network architecture will enable the operator to optimize its hardware footprint and reduce the cost per bit by using appliance-based packet core gateways.