NEC, Mavenir collaborate with DT for live 5G Open RAN mMIMO deployment

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The operator is experimenting with partners in the O-RAN Town of Neubrandenburg (pictured) ahead of mass Open RAN roll out.

Deutsche Telekom is an advocate of Open RAN, a founding member of the O-RAN Alliance and a signatory of the Open RAN MoU along with Orange, Telefonica, TIM and Vodafone.

The O-RAN Town project is the initial deployment of disaggregated RAN to serve about 65,000 residents in Neubrandenburg, a town north of Berlin, in preparation for the operator’s future mass deployment.

Massive MIMO

In this project, NEC will provide the 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, with beamforming technologies. The implementation of this mMIMO RU will help increase and dynamically optimise the operator’s capacity depending on traffic volume.
 
Mavenir will provide the container-based centralized unit (CU) and distributed units (DU) of the disaggregated RAN as a software. Working together with NEC, Mavenir is expanding its leadership to Open RAN mMIMO solutions.
 
After the first step of integrating NEC mMIMO antenna into DT’s live network, NEC’s and Mavenir’s Open RAN experts will jointly work to validate and optimise 5G Open RAN’s interoperability, as well as end-to-end functional and operational performance in the lab and field, ensuring full commercial readiness for deployments in Europe.

Flexibility and choice

“Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and innovation to ensure a more customer-centric network of the future,” said Abdurazak Mudesir, Senior Vice President, Service & Platform Telekom Germany and Head of Open RAN
 at 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 said, “With our partners, we are excited to showcase how open interfaces and cloud-native technologies accelerate innovation in RAN infrastructure areas such as mMIMO.”
 
Nozomu Watanabe, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation, added, “Capitalizing on our experiences gained from contributing to the world’s first commercial launch of Open RAN in Japan, we are thrilled to extend our capabilities to accelerate best-in-class, carrier-grade Open RAN deployment across the globe.”