SoftBank and Nokia plan AI-RAN commercial trials in 2027

SoftBank and Nokia plan AI-RAN commercial trials in 2027

Nokia and SoftBank plan to conduct AI-RAN trials on a live commercial network in Japan in 2027. SoftBank will deploy Nokia’s radio access network technology as part of its converged AI-RAN solution, AITRAS.

The deployment will use Nokia’s anyRAN software, which enables operators to run Nokia RAN software on third-party hardware. The trials are intended to validate AI-RAN technology under commercial traffic conditions.

Trial infrastructure

The trials will use Nvidia’s telecom-focused ARC-Pro computing platform. The underlying system will include:

• An Nvidia Grace CPU
• An RTX Pro 4500 GPU
• ConnectX-8 networking for high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity

AITRAS will coordinate the AI and RAN workloads through workload orchestration. The companies also plan to investigate how AI-RAN could support services and use cases that depend on lower latency and real-time intelligence, including robotics, immersive experiences, and autonomous systems requiring close interaction between AI and connectivity.

Ryuji Wakikawa, SVP and CTO at SoftBank, described the planned field trials as a transition for AI-RAN from concept to execution. SoftBank will integrate Nokia’s AI-native anyRAN as the RAN component of AITRAS. The AITRAS Orchestrator will work with Nokia’s RAN and MantaRay systems.

Nokia chief technology and AI officer Pallavi Mahajan said that combining AI and RAN workloads on common, programmable infrastructure could improve spectral efficiency and provide distributed intelligence for physical AI. She added that the work with SoftBank and AITRAS is intended to support real-time AI services and the development of AI-native 6G networks.

AI-RAN development efforts

AI-RAN has become a central area of future network development for both companies. Nokia secured approximately $1 billion in investment from Nvidia to support its AI-RAN work and launched a commercial platform for the emerging technology segment in July.

SoftBank has also been developing AI-RAN with Nvidia. The carrier uses the jointly developed AITRAS platform to apply AI to 5G networks and has tested Transformer models, the same class of neural networks used by applications such as ChatGPT, to improve RAN performance.

The planned AI-RAN trials build on other recent cooperation between Nokia and SoftBank, including joint passive optical network field tests and outdoor trials using the seven gigahertz band for 6G.

SoftBank has also conducted AI-RAN-related tests with Nokia competitor Ericsson. In those tests, an AI-native scheduler was introduced into SoftBank’s commercial 5G network and ran on the network’s baseband equipment to manage resources in real time. T-Mobile US conducted similar tests with Nokia’s competitor.