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New software and silicon is driving vRAN adoption in the field, according to a report from analysts Mobile Experts
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Verizon, SKT and KDDI are among the top five operators using the virtual radio technology
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Samsung is the top vendor, with Ericsson coming up
The past six months have marked a major milestone in the adoption of Virtual Radio Access Networks (vRAN ) for 5G, according to a new report from Mobile Experts. Vendors are bringing out new RAN software and silicon, which is driving adoption by mobile network operators (MNOs), Mobile Experts analyst Joe Madden told Fierce this week.
“The change in the last year is that semiconductor and software options are filling in, with AMD, ARM-based, and GPU-based options on the chip side and greater maturity in commercial software,” he said.
American, Japanese and South Korean operators are among the top deploying vRAN right now, Madden said. “Verizon, KDDI, DISH, SKT and DOCOMO are the top operators that are using virtual RAN commercially today,” the analyst said. “Almost all of the top 25 operators worldwide are testing vRAN in some way but these have deployed vRAN in commercial service,” he said.
Of the vendors: “Samsung is by far the most experienced with vRAN today, with tens of thousands of sites. Ericsson has made progress recently as well,” Madden added. Fierce previously reported that Verizon has already deployed well north of 10,000 vRAN sites with Samsung.
The AT&T deal with Ericsson will also have a significant impact on Cloud RAN, vRAN, and Open RAN over time, according to Mobile Experts. "The AT&T contract with Ericsson marks a very important milestone in deployment of Cloud RAN," Madden said. "While Ericsson is not delivering Cloud RAN broadly to AT&T today, the new contract establishes a roadmap which leads directly to vRAN and Open RAN for a more flexible, modern network."
Madden noted that most deployments today aren’t all happy-clappy multi-vendor Open RAN playgrounds but are still largely single-vendor rollouts. “The largest deployments of vRAN use single-vendor integration of [Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit and Central Unit] today.” he said. “Eventually the market should migrate to both Open RAN and Cloud Native, but not all deployments will use all elements of both trends.”