NEC and Mavenir on Tuesday announced that they have jointly collaborated in a live 5G Open RAN massive MIMO deployment as part of Deutsche Telekom's initiative, 'O-RAN Town'.
Deutsche Telekom is a strong, highly active advocate of Open RAN, a founding member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and one of the major operators who signed an Open RAN MOU earlier this year to prioritize deployments and foster greater investment in Open RAN technologies. The O-RAN Town project refers to the initial deployment of disaggregated RAN for serving approximately 65,000 residents in Neubrandenburg, a town north of Berlin, in preparation for the operator's future mass deployment.
In this project, NEC will provide its industry-leading 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with advanced beamforming technologies. The implementation of this mMIMO RU will help increase and dynamically optimize the operator's capacity depending on the actual traffic volume.
Mavenir will provide the container-based centralized units (CU) and distributed units (DU) of the disaggregated RAN as a software. Mavenir offers the industry's widest choice of cloud-native CU and DU solutions, built on open interfaces. Working together with NEC, Mavenir is expanding its leadership to Open RAN mMIMO solutions.
Following the first step of successfully integrating NEC mMIMO antennae into the DTAG live network, NEC's and Mavenir's Open RAN experts will jointly work to provide comprehensive validation and optimization of 5G Open RAN interoperability, as well as end-to-end functional and operational performance in the lab and field, ensuring full commercial readiness for deployments in Europe.
Abdurazak Mudesir, SVP, Service & Platform Telekom Germany and Head of Open RAN, Deutsche Telekom Group
We are happy to partner with Mavenir and NEC for the European first live implementation of massive MIMO at O-RAN Town, where our key priority is to drive the development of high performance multi-vendor open RAN to be a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale.
Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO, Mavenir
We appreciate the industry changing opportunity that Deutsche Telekom's O-RAN Town offers, and are glad to work together with our partner NEC to launch one of the first Open RAN mMIMO networks. Together with our partners, we are excited to showcase how open interfaces and cloud-native technologies accelerate innovation in RAN infrastructure areas such as mMIMO.
