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AT&T* and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) today announced that they have begun deploying Ericsson Cloud RAN technology on AT&T’s commercial 5G network.
The companies have completed a Cloud RAN call as a milestone in their Open RAN deployment. AT&T currently runs commercial traffic on its Cloud RAN site. Its first site is south of Dallas, Texas. The configuration used for Cloud RAN calls has been deployed on the AT&T network, and in the future third-party vendors will be able to use this configuration for Open RAN.
Chris Sambar, head of AT&T Networks, said: “This is the next milestone in AT&T’s Open RAN journey, accelerating C-band deployment and continuing network virtualization by moving traffic to cloud RAN sites. The future of open networks is It’s coming quickly and we look forward to the innovations it will bring to our customers.”
Fredrik Yedling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks at Ericsson, said: “At Ericsson, we are constantly innovating and leveraging technology trends and changes to stay ahead of the curve, so taking this next leap is natural for us. This development in our collaboration with AT&T , demonstrating our commitment to supporting AT&T’s Open RAN ambitions.”
As part of the live deployment, AT&T and Ericsson migrated one frequency band, 3700MHz, for C-band traffic to their cloud RAN infrastructure. This is the next step in AT&T’s continued collaboration with Ericsson to realize the benefits of Cloud RAN and move AT&T closer to its goal of a fully open, agile and programmable wireless network.
Moving to Cloud RAN will allow AT&T to deliver and protect data in the most cost-effective way possible, while creating an open environment for developers to create new apps and services. . AT&T and Ericsson will continue to implement and optimize new network capabilities in this rapidly evolving RAN cloud-based architecture space.
