Nokia and Saudi Arabia’s neutral-host provider TAWAL have completed the world’s first live demonstration of a multi-tenant, shareable Open RAN edge-cloud platform, enabling mobile operators and large enterprises to deploy high-performance 5G services at significantly reduced costs. The demonstration highlights TAWAL’s ability to offer active infrastructure as a service while helping operators lower expenses and futureproof their networks with open, cloud-native flexibility. Powered by Nokia’s anyRAN architecture, the platform delivers the trusted performance needed to support any RAN workloads on an open edge cloud.
As Saudi Arabia’s smart city giga projects drive increasing demand for expansive 5G connectivity, traditional single-operator rollouts risk duplicating infrastructure and delaying service availability. TAWAL’s neutral host model addresses this by pooling spectrum-agnostic, Open RAN baseband and radio resources, allowing multiple operators to share the same edge cloud platform. This approach reduces capital expenditures, cuts energy consumption, optimises spectrum use and narrows the digital divide for businesses and communities nationwide. Nokia’s anyRAN solution, built on open interfaces, cloud-agnostic software and high-performance AirScale radios, is designed to unlock these efficiencies.
Abdulrahman Al Moaiqel, Chief Commercial Officer at TAWAL, said: “Neutral hosts must add value beyond steel and concrete. By partnering with Nokia, we can offer Saudi operators an on-demand, pay-as-you-grow 5G platform that cuts their TCO and accelerates digital transformation for the Kingdom’s giga projects.”
Mikko Lavanti, Senior Vice President, Middle East and Africa at Nokia, added: “Moving from a tower company model to a fully-fledged network company demands technology that combines openness with proven performance. Our anyRAN approach lets TAWAL mix and match vendors at the cloud layer while still guaranteeing the ultrareliable, low-latency experience operators and end users expect.”
The live demonstration, held at LEAP 2025 in Riyadh, showcased Nokia’s 5G AirScale Indoor Radios connected to Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers running virtualised CU/DU software within Nokia’s anyRAN framework. The cloud-native platform supports multi-operator RAN sharing and can accommodate third-party RAN software, providing TAWAL with full vendor flexibility while maintaining carrier-grade performance. Its compact size and low power consumption make it ideal for smart city edge deployments and enterprise campuses.
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