Deutsche Telekom is celebrating its first Open RAN deployment in Germany, partnering with Nokia, Fujitsu and Mavenir among others. Customers in the Neubrandenburg area will receive 2G, 4G and 5G services from the deployment in the ‘brownfield’ network environment of Telekom Deutschland.
“Open RAN has matured over the last months in both stability and performance, which has given us the confidence for an initial commercial deployment. Together with Nokia, Mavenir and other ecosystem partners, we will use our collaboration as the springboard to accelerate Open RAN development and create a path to deployment at scale,” says Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom Group CTO & CTO Germany.
The sites at Neubrandenburg are built on a multi-vendor open RAN architecture with open fronthaul support and equipment from Nokia and Fujitsu. Nokia will deliver the baseband units. The O-RAN-compliant remote Radio Units (O-RUs) will be provided by 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 (O-DU) and central units (O-CU), including for the open fronthaul based mMIMO radio units.
Deutsche Telekom co-founded the xRAN Forum in 2016, which led to the formation of the telco-led O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2018. An O-RAN pilot program was initiated by the MNO in Neubrandenburg to test, assess and gain operational experience from a high-power multi-vendor deployment in a brownfield network.
“Open RAN is critical to Deutsche Telekom’s strategy to foster greater vendor diversity and accelerate customer focused innovation in the radio access network,” said Claudia Nemat, Board Member Deutsche Telekom AG, responsible for Technology and Innovation. “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.”
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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