Samsung Electronics has announced that it will deploy its cloud-native fully virtualised Radio Access Network (vRAN) solutions for the mid-band spectrum in Japanese operator KDDI’s 5G network. The pair have been working together on advanced research on vRAN to drive 5G innovation for the cellco’s network and recently completed ‘the first 5G Standalone (SA) call using Samsung’s vRAN and another vendor’s 5G Massive MIMO radios, which are O-RAN compliant’.
In the press release, the Korean vendor said that virtualised networks will play a key role in supporting KDDI’s pursuit of new 5G use cases and next-generation capabilities. In 2020, for instance, Samsung and KDDI demonstrated how 5G end-to-end network slicing could play a key role for mobile operators by enabling the creation of multiple virtual networks within a single physical network infrastructure. Samsung and KDDI will begin trials in Q1 of 2022, and start commercial deployment in the second half of 2022.