Mavenir and NEC Corporation have deployed massive MIMO on Orange’s 5G standalone (SA) experimental network.
Mavenir’s open, virtualized radio access network (open vRAN) software has been deployed on Orange’s cloud infrastructure. And Orange used NEC’s 32T32R mMIMO active antenna unit to deliver high capacity and enhanced coverage.
The technologies have been deployed at the Orange Gardens campus in Chatillon near Paris and are part of the extension of project Pikeo – Orange’s cloud-based and fully automated 5G SA experimental network.
“Our Open RAN Integration Centre, open to our partners worldwide, contributes to the development of a strong open RAN ecosystem in Europe,” said Arnaud Vamparys, SVP of Radio Access Networks and Microwave at Orange, in a statement.
Naohisa Matsuda, general manager of NEC’s 5G Strategy and Business, stated: “The latest deployment of open RAN mMIMO in Europe is another milestone for open RAN and one that required close collaboration and tight integration between multiple vendors. This synergy is exactly what Open RAN needs to successfully deliver on its promise of a truly open multi-vendor ecosystem.”
The companies say that interoperability between radios and virtualized distributed units (vDUs) over the O-RAN Alliance Open Fronthaul Interface is key to open RAN’s ability to simplify the deployment of multi-vendor networks and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Speaking at a Fierce Wireless free, virtual Open RAN Summit today, Patrick Lopez, global VP for 5G product management at NEC, provided a great overview of the history of open RAN.
He said the O-RAN Alliance was formed in 2018, and in that same year Telefonica launched the first open RAN deployment in a commercial network in Peru.
In 2020 Rakuten announced the first massive MIMO live deployment in an urban network.
“Open RAN has been really moving very fast as a new standard,” said Lopez. “NEC has been very active from the inception of open RAN until now. Many vendors of open RAN are adopting cloud-native technology, and we believe this is a really important part of the open RAN deployment because many networks are cloudifying."
Lopez said having a cloud-native open RAN provides the capability to deliver on the promises of 5G. "The promise of 5G is to deliver a network and a connectivity product that is different for different types of devices, different types of use cases," he said. "And that’s not possible to do without cloud-native technologies."