Deutsche Telekom has activated its “O-RAN Town” in Neubrandenburg, Germany.
O-RAN Town is a multi-vendor open RAN network that will deliver open RAN based 4G and 5G services across up to 25 sites. The deployment includes Europe’s first integration of massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units using O-RAN open fronthaul interfaces to connect to the virtualized RAN software.
The first live sites at O-RAN Town are built on a truly multi-vendor open RAN architecture with equipment from vendor partners Dell, Fujitsu, Intel, Mavenir, NEC and Supermicro. The remote radio units (O-RU) are provided by Fujitsu and NEC, including Fujitsu’s LTE and 5G NR O-RUs and NEC’s 32T32R 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with advanced beamforming technologies. Mavenir provides the Cloud-Native baseband software for the 4G and 5G distributed units (O-DU) and central units (O-CU), including for the mMIMO radio units. The virtualized baseband software is running on standard server hardware provided by Dell and Supermicro. The entire O-RAN Cloud architecture is built on top of the Intel FlexRAN software architecture.
Deutsche Telekom plans to expand O-RAN Town in phases across 2021 and 2022, working with different sets of vendors.
Claudia Nemat, Board Member, Technology & Innovation, Deutsche Telekom: “Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and reinvigorating our industry to bring in innovation for the benefit our customers. Switching on our O-RAN Town including massive MIMO is a pivotal moment on our journey to drive the development of open RAN as a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale. This is just the start. We will expand O-RAN Town over time with a diverse set of supplier partners to further develop our operational experience of high-performance multi-vendor open RAN.”
“Another key goal with open RAN is to benefit from automation. In the near future, we can more flexibly add new network features, resolve traffic issues or intelligently reduce power consumption,” says Claudia Nemat. “Through our independent management framework, we are getting operational experience of utilizing automation to address the integration challenge, complexity and improving outcomes in a truly multi-vendor open RAN system,” says Claudia Nemat.
