Nokia announced an agreement with Microsoft to create 4G and 5G private wireless offerings. The agreement combines Nokia's Cloud RAN technology with Azure. The project is planned to run in three stages through which Nokia will combine its Cloud RAN, Open RAN, Radio Access Controller, and multi-access edge cloud offerings with Private Edge Zone.

The initiative is intended to improve performance and end user experiences for third-party developers. Nokia will integrate its 5G RAN with Azure 4G and 5G core to demo interworking, as well as explore opportunities with the Airframe OpenEdge server.

The announcement appears alongside similar partnerships with AWS and Google.