The DISH Wireless 5G network ended February with two major network announcements. It marked the beginning of Samsung’s role in its nationwide rollout, with the deployment and testing of the Samsung-supported sites with initial shipment of 24,000 Open RAN-compliant radios and 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN) software solutions. Meanwhile, Mavenir is providing DISH Wireless with Open vRAN software that supports DISH frequency bands in more than 40,000 radios across the DISH 5G cloud-native Open RAN network.
“Samsung is a key player in the DISH Wireless Open RAN ecosystem, created in collaboration with additional Open RAN leaders like Dell, VMware, AWS and others,” said Marc Rouanne, EVP and Chief Network Officer, DISH Wireless. “Samsung’s 5G vRAN solutions and our shared innovation process allow DISH Wireless to continue the DISH 5G multi-vendor, open and interoperable cloud-native network buildout, as we progress to covering 70 percent of the U.S. population.”
For this year’s rollout, Samsung provided its virtualized distributed unit (vDU), virtualized central unit (vCU) and Open RAN-compliant 5G radios, which support the DISH spectrum bands. Samsung also built new dual-band and tri-band Open RAN-compliant radios specific for this deployment.
Mavenir is providing DISH Wireless with fully virtualized, Open RAN centralized unit (O-CU) and distributed unit (O-DU) software that operates on vendor-neutral hardware. This aligns with the DISH 5G network standard as a 100-percent microservices-based, cloud-native solution that runs telco workloads on private, public, and hybrid clouds, according to DISH Wireless.
“DISH Wireless can now run telco applications on the cloud – in large central data centers and at the edge with its multi-vendor, cloud-native, open, and disaggregated network,” said Mavenir President/CEO Pardeep Kohli.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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