Ooredoo Qatar’s 5G commercial services go live with Nokia cloud-native 5G core network

• Nokia cloud-native 5G core network allows Ooredoo Qatar to deliver a wide breadth of commercial 5G services to its retail and enterprise users
• This milestone reaffirms Ooredoo Qatar’s commitment to transforming network assets to cloud-native technology

Nokia has today announced that Ooredoo Qatar has launched a Nokia-powered cloud-native core network for commercial 5G services, allowing the operator to provide superior mobile broadband services to its roughly two million subscribers in Qatar.

The new core network facilitates automation for improved network efficiency and streamlined network management. The transformation of the core network also enables Ooredoo Qatar to bring new and exciting use cases such as Industrial IOT (IIoT), Voice over Broadband (VoBB), Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) to its subscribers. Furthermore, Nokia’s equipment and professional services will help Ooredoo Qatar to scale its network more efficiently with automated operations and enhanced robustness.

5G technology demands a dynamic, agile, and easily scalable core network, which can address the ever-increasing traffic without any impact on the performance. The cloud-native core is essential to meet the critical business objectives of 5G, including better bandwidth and latency, the requirement of IoT, and providing new and exciting services that go beyond the traditional offerings of voice, broadband and messaging by service providers.

Nokia AirFrame data center hardware, CloudBand Application Manager, CBIS OpenStack Software, Voice and Cloud Packet Core Virtual Network Functions, and Nuage Networks Software Defined Networking solutions were all included as key parts in upgrading Ooredoo Qatar’s core network.

More than 10 virtualized network functions (VNFs) are deployed on the cloud platform, covering data, voice, subscriber management registers and policy control enabling voice and data services. The new cloud core network supports 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) architecture and provides a smooth transition to a 5G Standalone network architecture.

Yousuf Abdulla Al Kubaisi, Chief Operating Officer at Ooredoo Qatar, said: “We are delighted to reach this milestone by launching the state-of-the-art cloud-native 5G core network with Nokia for carrying 5G commercial services. Collaboration with Nokia, a global technology leader, will help us in providing low-latency, high-speed and content-rich services to our subscribers. This project is testament to our commitment to bringing the latest technology to our subscribers, in line with our goal of complete customer satisfaction, and reiterates our leadership position in the global 5G ecosystem.”

Henrique Vale, Vice President of Nokia Software for Middle East and Africa, said: “The transformation of Ooredoo Qatar’s legacy core network to a fully cloud-native 5G core in a very short time frame demonstrates the strength of our end-to-end portfolio and exceptional delivery expertise. Ooredoo Qatar’s new core network will enable it to bring innovative and the latest use cases to its subscribers and also prepares the network for providing scalable 5G commercial services.”

Overview of the solution used for deployment: 

• Nokia AirFrame data center solution supports open-source and enables full hyper-scale to extremely distributed capabilities that will be necessary for future telco and IT networking and service delivery.
• Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) include Mobile Core for Voice, with Cloud Packet Core, Subscriber Management Registers and Policy control on a cloud platform.
• Nokia CloudBand allows service providers to host, orchestrate, automate and manage Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) and services. It makes it easier for telcos to reduce time to revenue for new services and use automation and optimization to make network operations lean
• Nokia NetAct provides a consolidated view of multi-domain, multi-technology networks, helping service providers in proactively addressing any network-related issue
• Nuage Networks from Nokia SDN solutions enable telco cloud network automation.
• Nokia Professional services ensured an efficient and timely execution of the project