DISH Network Corporation has chosen Samsung’s fully virtualized ORAN-compliant 5G Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) technology for its network, dubbed SMART 5G™. The two companies will collaborate to deploy Samsung’s solutions and radio units, supporting DISH’s 5G commercial services.
The announcement represents a change in strategy for DISH. In June 2020, DISH opted to deploy Fujitsu 5G radio units (RUs) at its macro sites and chose a different vendor, Altiostar, to deliver cloud-native virtual RAN (vRAN) software. And in December of that year, 5G field validation of ORAN radio units from MTI was completed by the carrier.
“One thing that stands out is that Samsung is supplying both the radios and the vRAN software,” said Joe Madden, principal analyst, Mobile-Experts. “So this is starting to look more like a dedicated system and not an open RAN system.”
Samsung will supply DISH with its 5G and RAN solutions, vRAN software and a variety of ORAN-compliant radio units, including Massive MIMO radios. Samsung’s vRAN can operate on any commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server, while still delivering performance on par with traditional hardware-based equipment.
The decision to add Samsung to its stable of vendors might have to do with increasing the performance of cell sites in urban areas, according to Madden. If Samsung supplies the virtual centralized unit (VCU), the virtual distributed unit (VDU) and VRAN software, the result will be more advanced features that can achieve higher performance with massive MIMO, notes the analyst.
“If you want to implement high-performance Massive MIMO, O-RAN Alliance standards are really not complete enough to implement that today in multiple frequency bands with carrier aggregation and all the features,” Madden said. “To get the highest performance, I would say that Samsung is ahead of Ericsson and Nokia in terms of experience with true VRAN systems. They’re the most proven vendor when it comes to Massive MIMO vRAN.”
With its cloud-native architecture, DISH’s ORAN deployment is based on open interfaces, allowing for multi-vendor interoperability and various deployment scenarios. The Samsung radios will also support all of DISH’s Frequency Division Duplex and Time Division Duplex spectrum bands (including n71, n29, n66, n70, n48 and n77).
In the summer of 2020, Samsung introduced its 5G vRAN, which consisted of a VCU, a VDU, and a range of radio units to deliver a fully-virtualized 5G vRAN. When combined with Samsung’s virtualized 4G/5G Core, an operator will be able to implement an end-to-end software-based radio and core network running on COTS x86 servers.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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