German telecoms group Deutsche Telekom (DT) has revealed that it will partner with Nokia, Fujitsu and Mavenir among others for initial commercial deployments of Open RAN across its European footprint. Nokia and Fujitsu have been chosen as partners for an initial commercial Open RAN introduction in Germany from 2023 onwards, with customers in the Neubrandenburg area set to receive 2G, 4G and 5G services from the deployment in the ‘brownfield’ network environment of Telekom Deutschland. In addition, Mavenir has been chosen as partner for an initial multi-vendor deployment in DT’s European footprint starting in 2023.
Open RAN enables operators to introduce network components from different vendors to allow interoperability, for example the sites at Neubrandenburg are built on a multi-vendor Open RAN architecture with open fronthaul support and equipment from both Nokia and Fujitsu. For further deployments in the European footprint, Mavenir will provide the Cloud-Native baseband software for the 4G and 5G distributed units and central units, including for the open fronthaul based mMIMO radio units. Other partners will be announced in due course.
‘Open RAN is critical to DT’s strategy to foster greater vendor diversity and accelerate customer focused innovation in the radio access network,’ said Claudia Nemat, Board Member for Technology and Innovation, adding: ‘We are committed to Open RAN as the technology of choice for future networks and as a catalyst to take Europe forward in the digital era, so we are making it happen with partners.’