Mavenir has deployed Open vRAN, integrated with massive MIMO (mMIMO) Active Antenna Units (AAU), as part of Deutsche Telekom’s, “O-RAN Town” in Germany to deliver a 5G Non-Standalone Architecture (NSA) service. The O-RAN network, launched in the city of Neubrandenburg this past June, is a multi-vendor open RAN network that will deliver O-RAN-based 4G and 5G services across up to 25 sites.
“Mavenir is showing once again how Open vRAN can be flexible and adapt to different use case scenarios in an easy and simple way”, said Ian Pattison, International CTO at Mavenir. “Within this project, the whole team has demonstrated how disaggregated and open RAN gives benefits, including enabling innovation and new solutions for an automated network of the future.”
The solution, called MAVair Open vRAN, provides the cloud-native, fully containerized 4G and 5G baseband for the disaggregated Open vRAN solution conforming to O-RAN CAT B specifications, and is deployed on generic commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms using the latest Intel central processing units (CPU) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) acceleration technologies.
The company said the solution has already been integrated into Telekom Germany’s live network and represents the first multi-vendor mMIMO deployment using the fully standardized open fronthaul 7-2 CAT B split between mMIMO radio units (RU) and O-DU in a live network. In addition to the mMIMO RU, the network includes LTE and 5G n78 radios, all with O-RAN Alliance Open fronthaul interfaces.
“Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and innovation to ensure a more automated and customer-centric network of the future,” said Abdurazak Mudesir, SVP of service and platform at Telekom Germany and head of the Open RAN Deutsche Telekom Group. “We are delighted to work with Mavenir to achieve this milestone of Europe’s first live implementation of massive MIMO at O-RAN Town, where our priority is the development of high-performance, multi-vendor open RAN as a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale.”
Two weeks ago, the MAVair solution was used for what Mavenir claimed be the first live commercial Open vRAN with the Telecom Infra Project’s Evenstar 4G RR deployment. The deployment, achieved in partnership with Axiata, was conducted in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia.