It is the first time that Samsung’s 5G vRAN solution is being used in a commercial network in the country.
The site is now operating in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, providing high-performance and reliable 4G and 5G services to customers.
In the coming months, the companies will expand the vRAN and Open RAN network to seven additional sites in the region, aiming to extend the Open RAN footprint.
This milestone builds on the companies’ joint initiative, announced in October 2023, where they agreed to develop a roadmap for several tests of vRAN and Open RAN technologies.
Following the trials, O2 Telefónica and Samsung are now progressing from lab to field with the launch of this first commercial site.
“We are taking another big step in our Open RAN journey. Together with Samsung, we are utilising the latest Open RAN technologies in our mobile network,” said Mallik Rao, chief technology and information officer of O2 Telefónica.
“On the way to the network of the future, we are integrating new network solutions to provide our customers with outstanding connectivity. Open RAN is a building block that can help us to automate our network, deploy new updates faster and use network components more flexibly.”
The companies have successfully switched on this first commercial site just three months after the initial shipment of 4G and 5G solutions.
For the initial deployments, Samsung’s offering includes its market-leading 4G and 5G vRAN 3.0 solution and Open RAN-compliant radios supporting low and mid-bands including 64T64R Massive MIMO radios.
As the next step, the companies will introduce Samsung’s intelligent network automation solution to control life cycle management – from deployment to maintenance.
This Open RAN-compliant automation solution offers the ability to accelerate innovative software-based network rollouts by enabling automated deployment of thousands of network sites simultaneously.
