First live Open RAN with massive MIMO antennas in Europe

NEUBRANDENBURG, GERMANY-- July 16, 2021 -- Mavenir, the Network Software Provider building the future of networks with cloud-native software that runs on any cloud and transforms the way the world connects, today announced the deployment of Open vRAN, integrated with massive MIMO (mMIMO) Active Antenna Units (AAU), as part of Deutsche Telekom’s initiative, “O-RAN Town.”

MAVair Open vRAN provides the cloud-native, fully containerized 4G and 5G baseband for the disaggregated Open vRAN solution conforming to O-RAN CAT B specifications, based on distributed units (O-DU) and central units (O-CU), to deliver a 5G Non-Standalone Architecture (NSA) service in O-RAN Town. The first sites are now deployed and integrated to Telekom Germany’s live network. This is Europe’s first multi-vendor mMIMO deployment using the fully standardized open fronthaul 7-2 CAT B split between mMIMO radio units (RU) and O-DU in a live network. This is a true multi-vendor Open vRAN system and, in addition to the mMIMO RU, includes LTE and 5G n78 radios, all with O-RAN Alliance Open fronthaul interfaces.

The MAVair solution is deployed on generic commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms using the latest Intel central processing units (CPU) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) acceleration technologies. Mavenir’s Open vRAN solution provides open management interfaces to integrate to Deutsche Telekom’s vendor-independent Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) platform.

“We are proud to provide our MAVair Open vRAN solution as part of DTAG’s O-RAN Town, including mMIMO. Mavenir is showing once again how Open vRAN can be flexible and adapt to different use case scenarios in an easy and simple way,” said Ian Pattison, International CTO at Mavenir. “Within this project, the whole team has demonstrated how disaggregated and open RAN gives benefits, including enabling innovation and new solutions for an automated network of the future.”

“Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and innovation to ensure a more automated and customer-centric network of the future,” said Abdurazak Mudesir, SVP Service & Platform, Telekom Germany and Head of Open RAN Deutsche Telekom Group. “We are delighted to work with Mavenir to achieve this milestone of Europe’s first live implementation of massive MIMO at O-RAN Town, where our priority is the development of high performance multi-vendor open RAN as a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale.”

Mavenir in addition to providing the Open vRAN software is integrating it into the multi-vendor O-RAN RUs, deploying the RUs, including mMIMO, at the cell sites and as part of the multi-vendor O-Cloud building the Kubernetes cloud based on MAVscale platform, (Mavenir Webscale Platform) running on COTS servers and on boarding the O-DUs and O-CUs to this cloud.