Testing will first be carried out technologies at a lab in Munich, and then in a commercial 5G network in Landsberg am Lech
Samsung Electronics and O2 Telefónica are jointly trialing advanced cloud-native virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) and Open RAN technologies in several lab and field tests. Initially, testing will be carried out technologies at a lab in Munich, Germany and will focus on both 4G and 5G vRAN and Open RAN technologies. After that, the pair will move the testing to a commercial 5G network in Landsberg am Lech.
The tests will also explore intelligent network automation solutions to control life cycle management using Samsung’s Open RAN-compliant Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) solution. The Korean company will also provide its 4G and 5G vRAN software and Open RAN-compliant radios supporting low- and mid-bands, including 3.5 GHz Massive MIMO radios.
“We believe cloud-native and autonomous architecture is a central pillar of network transformation to accelerate the adoption of innovative services, and O2 Telefónica is working with the best players in the field,” said Mallik Rao, chief technology & information officer at O2 Telefónica in Germany. “We are delighted to team up with Samsung as one of the first telecommunications providers in the European Union to test new networking solutions. We look forward to delivering the best-in-class connectivity to bring a host of new benefits to customers in the future.”
For O2 Telefónica, vRAN offers more computation in an “elastic cloud environment,” said the company, adding that this will have “positive impacts on automation, availability, deployment speed and flexible capacity steering,” as well as enable low latency for advanced use cases like VR and AR.
In addition, Dell Technologies is providing its PowerEdge servers, Intel is providing its Xeon Scalable Processor and Wind River is providing its Cloud Platform for the commercial pilot.
Earlier this month, Samsung completed the first 4G calls over shared commercial networks in rural areas of Romania based on Open RAN in a pilot project with partners Vodafone and Orange, and prior to that supported Vodafone’s deployment of Open RAN across 2,500 mobile sites in Wales and the South-West of England.
