Deutsche Telekom Picks NEC, Mavenir for 5G Open RAN at O-RAN Town

NEC Corporation and Mavenir have jointly collaborated in a live 5G Open RAN massive MIMO deployment as part of Deutsche Telekom's initiative, "O-RAN Town".

Deutsche Telekom is a strong, highly active advocate of Open RAN, a founding member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and one of the major operators who signed an Open RAN MOU earlier this year to prioritize deployments and foster greater investment in Open RAN technologies.

The O-RAN Town project refers to the initial deployment of disaggregated RAN for serving approximately 65,000 residents in Neubrandenburg, a town north of Berlin, in preparation for the operator's future mass deployment.

In this project, NEC will provide its industry-leading 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with advanced beamforming technologies. The implementation of this mMIMO RU will help increase and dynamically optimize the operator's capacity depending on the actual traffic volume.

Mavenir will provide the container-based centralized units (CU) and distributed units (DU) of the disaggregated RAN as a software. Mavenir offers the industry's widest choice of cloud-native CU and DU solutions, built on open interfaces. Working together with NEC, Mavenir is expanding its leadership to Open RAN mMIMO solutions.

Following the first step of successfully integrating NEC mMIMO antennae into the DTAG live network, NEC's and Mavenir's Open RAN experts will jointly work to provide comprehensive validation and optimization of 5G Open RAN interoperability, as well as end-to-end functional and operational performance in the lab and field, ensuring full commercial readiness for deployments in Europe.

"Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and innovation to ensure a more customer-centric network of the future," said Abdurazak Mudesir, Senior Vice President, Service & Platform Telekom Germany and Head of Open RAN, Deutsche Telekom Group. "We are happy to partner with Mavenir and NEC for the European first live implementation of massive MIMO at O-RAN Town, where our key priority is to drive the development of high performance multi-vendor open RAN to be a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale."

"We appreciate the industry changing opportunity that Deutsche Telekom's O-RAN Town offers, and are glad to work together with our partner NEC to launch one of the first Open RAN mMIMO networks," said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO, Mavenir. "Together with our partners, we are excited to showcase how open interfaces and cloud-native technologies accelerate innovation in RAN infrastructure areas such as mMIMO."

"We are honored to contribute to Deutsche Telekom's highly strategic initiative in collaboration with Mavenir," said Nozomu Watanabe, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation. "Capitalizing on our experiences gained from contributing to the world's first commercial launch of Open RAN in Japan, we are thrilled to extend our capabilities to accelerate best-in-class, carrier-grade Open RAN deployment across the globe."