Ericsson supplied hardware and software and conducted demonstrations, test cases and performance assessments for the trial
Swedish vendor Ericsson and Turkish operator Turkcell announced a successful trial deployment of the Ericsson 5G Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) technology on Turkcell’s network.
With the deployment, Turkcell claimed to be one of the first communications service providers globally to try this technology.
In this trial, Ericsson supplied hardware and software and conducted demonstrations, test cases and performance assessments.
Ericsson Cloud RAN is a cloud-native solution that virtualizes RAN functions and decouples hardware from software, offering new opportunities to scale and foster network efficiency and virtualization to operators that want to implement cloud-native technology and open network architecture.
By adopting Cloud RAN technology, Turkcell said it aims to introduce new software features and incorporate an Open RAN approach into its service management and orchestration (SMO) framework.
Vehbi Çağrı Güngör, chief network technologies officer at Turkcell, said:”As one of the first examples in the world, the trial of the 5G Cloud RAN technology conducted with Ericsson will contribute to strengthening Turkcell’s strategy for cloudifying network operations. This initiative will also support our transition to an Open RAN network strategy and enhance the advanced connectivity experience we offer in Turkey.”
“Our Cloud RAN solution is designed to provide the flexibility and performance essential for modern networks while improving overall scalability. This trial is in line with Ericsson’s strategy to support our customers in transforming their networks into a platform that will enable new monetization use cases through open APIs.” said Işıl Yalçın, vice president and head of Ericsson Türkiye at Ericsson Middle East and Africa.
Ericsson and Turkcell had previously announced the completion of a successful 5G Standalone (SA) proof of concept (PoC), in which they demonstrated how tailored 5G network slices can be instantiated on-demand to meet the connectivity needs of customers, how multiple slices can serve a single 5G device with both enterprise and consumer user profiles and how charging can be differentiated among different slices.
The PoC demonstrated how “work” and “personal” applications on a 5G device can be associated to different profiles, each linked to dedicated network slices.
The PoC was implemented on a 5G core testbed running on Turkcell’s telco cloud infrastructure deployed in lab environment of Turkcell. The setup contained Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G core, Dynamic Radio Resource Partitioning, a feature of 5G RAN slicing and Ericsson radio system products. Automation was provided through the Ericsson Orchestrator. Additionally, the PoC included Ericsson Charging, which was utilized for differentiated charging models based on slice characteristics.
Ericsson and Turkcell have been trialing 5G SA technology and innovative 5G use cases such as 5G-connected autonomous mobile robots, sensor network, private 5G network, network slicing for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and fixed wireless access (FWA).