Telus said commercial deployment of the technology will begin in the first half of this year.
Canadian carriers Telus and Samsung Electronics have announced they will build what will be Canada’s first commercial virtualized open RAN (O-RAN) network.
The companies said they are expanding their collaboration from greenfield to brownfield deployments.
The partners also noted that this deployment will be the first truly virtualized O-RAN deployment within a brownfield network environment.
Telus says O-RAN allows it to use components from different manufacturers, and virtual radio access network (vRAN) enables the use of software instead of hardware.
“This is a very exciting milestone for Telus and the industry as a whole,” said Nazim Benhadid, Telus’ Chief Technology Officer. “This is because we can deliver a new level of mobile experience.”
Telus and Samsung have extensively tested both vRAN and O-RAN deployments in select Canadian markets, validating the telecom-grade performance and reliability of multivendor O-RAN technology leveraging Samsung’s vRAN solution. said.
Commercial deployment of the technology will begin in the first half of this year, with large-scale network deployments expected to begin by mid-2024.
Under the terms of this expanded cooperation, Samsung will provide vRAN software and O-RAN compliant solutions, including the 64T64R Massive MIMO radio, and support for third-party radio integration.
Samsung’s solutions include the latest vRAN 3.0 for 4G and 5G, which delivers improved energy savings, performance optimization, and intelligent automation with Samsung’s Service Management and Orchestration (SMO). It has enhanced features for:
Cloud infrastructure will also be provided by Wind River, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise will provide HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 servers powered by 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel vRAN Boost. It provides an open, flexible, yet workload-optimized foundation for O-RAN. For distributed units (DUs).
Last month, Ericsson partnered with Telus to launch and optimize a 5G standalone (5G SA) network at the national level. The 5G SA network will be delivered through Ericsson’s cloud-native dual-mode 5G core solution, enabling advanced 5G services, the vendor said.
Telus began deploying 3.5 GHz spectrum in its existing 5G wireless network in June 2022, delivering increased capacity, lower latency, and faster speeds to customers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, and Victoria.
Telus noted that its 3.5 GHz spectrum will enable multi-access edge computing (MEC) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, while facilitating important advances in health, agriculture, energy, transportation, and manufacturing.
Telus previously selected Samsung Electronics as its 5G network infrastructure supplier in June 2020. Telus also said European vendors Ericsson and Nokia also helped roll out its 5G network.
