Verizon launched a multivendor open radio access network (RAN) distributed antenna system (DAS) at the University of Texas in Austin and the Austin Convention Center using equipment from Samsung and CommScope running on top of its edge-focused virtualized cloud architecture, a move that includes details that the carrier said is lacking from some rivals.

Adam Koeppe, SVP of technology planning at Verizon, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the deployment uses CommScope DAS radios to provide the radio frequency signal within the buildings. Network control and traffic from that DAS system is tied back to Verizon’s network by a Samsung open RAN-capable distributed unit (DU) that “looks like any other Samsung cell site on our network,” Koeppe said.

Koeppe noted the deployment is the first of its kind and a key open RAN milestone.

“Having the ability to pick and choose vendors based on their capabilities and knowing that they can interoperate on either side of that equation and yield high performance, high quality, low cost, whatever your goal is, for the network,” Koeppe said. “In this case, you've got a Samsung component and you've got a CommScope component in the DAS system, so that hasn't been done before. It represents, really, the true spirit, if you will, of [open] RAN where you have two vendors in that supplier system on either ends of that.”

Koeppe also touted Verizon’s level of announced open RAN detail and to the O-RAN Alliance specification tied to the deployment.

“Certainly, a very popular topic in the industry,” Koeppe said of open RAN, adding “not a lot of specificity coming out of operators in our industry related to actual O-RAN deployments.”

“Not just having one vendor with both the baseband and the radio being O-RAN compliant, but mixing and matching those and having a vendor for the baseband and a vendor for the radio, and they're two separate vendors, that is really the most challenging aspect of O-RAN but it's one that yields the most long-term benefit,” Koeppe said.

Verizon rival AT&T has been one of the more vocal open RAN proponents, including its highly publicized announcement a year ago that it would be investing around $14 billion over the next five years to deploy open RAN equipment with the goal of having 70% of its wireless network traffic flowing through its open RAN platform by the end of 2026.

However, some have also pointed to that deal relying on Ericsson as the main underlying platform.

“It’s no surprise that, for example, AT&T when they are going to open RAN they gave everything to Ericsson to make sure everything works with a single-stack vendor and there’s not finger pointing, and only then will they open it up to other radio vendors and potentially other parts of the stack as well,” Recon Analytics Founder Roger Entner noted in a podcast.

Verizon, for its part, has had a long-standing relationship with Samsung on its network virtualization (NV) efforts.

Samsung earlier this year completed open RAN conformance and interoperability testing with Verizon. That lab work built on past efforts between Samsung and Verizon, which included supplanting Nokia as one of Verizon’s main RAN and 5G equipment suppliers in 2020, and providing Verizon with a majority of its vRAN equipment core to its 5G expansion.

Open RAN, the cloud, and the ‘far edge’ Koeppe termed the latest deployment as a “far edge,” which is just one aspect of Verizon’s long-standing NV journey.

These efforts have constructed a network architecture that includes its webscale equipment-based virtualized core locations, which Koeppe said “were few in number” and are tasked with handling signaling traffic and authentication, “things that don’t typically have very sensitive latency requirements.”

These support Verizon’s “edge” network that is based on equipment “scattered around the country” and are meant for user-plane traffic “where latency sensitivity is important.” These also house the infrastructure for Verizon’s oft-discussed mobile edge compute (MEC) services.

“When you get past the edge and into either individual cell sites that are sitting on top of a hill or on top of a rooftop in the city or in this scenario, that's your far edge,” Koeppe said of these “cell site processing locations.”

This includes the deployment of more than 130,000 open RAN “capable” radios that are compatible with specifications from the O-RAN Alliance. These radios include massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology.

“There are a lot of different ways to slice that,” Koeppe said of this far-edge architecture. “We've done RAN hub locations in the past where you house a whole bunch of baseband processing and then use dark fiber front hall to connect to radio nodes, we've done that in the past. That concept of having cell site processing out in those locations, in our cloud, … that's referred by us as the far edge. That's the far edge of the network that's doing this cloud-based processing.”

Verizon’s internal cloud efforts, also known as its Virtual Cloud Platform, are a particular area of pride for the carrier.

“We absolutely love our current model,” Koeppe said. “Our goal in the beginning when we started down our virtualization path was to ensure that we had control over the customer experience on top of our own internal cloud. We have a whole series of tools for optimization, service delivery, pushing software, orchestration, and automation, all the bells and whistles, but our goal is always have control over that customer experience, and our distributed network architecture puts us in a unique position to be able to offer low latency services with our existing infrastructure locations.”

That pride comes as some operators have moved to or are looking to run some of their core virtualized components in public cloud environments.

German telecommunication giant O2 Telefónica, for instance, earlier this year started to port live 5G traffic into a public cloud environment hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia. The move will see the operator run a Nokia-sourced 5G Cloud Core platform on AWS’ public cloud infrastructure, marking the first time a brownfield mobile telecommunication operator had migrated its existing network and customer base to a 5G cloud platform running on AWS.

Koeppe explained that there are scenarios where there is a need to support hybrid-cloud approaches, “particularly in the enterprise space.”

“So many of our enterprise customers have their solutions running in public cloud locations and we're providing a private network experience where they've got their own cloud on their campus for communications … but then they use a public cloud for other services,” Koeppe said. “Our goal there is to ensure that we meet the needs of that enterprise customer. When they want a private network from us, we're providing that. And if they've got other services that run on the public cloud, that's they manage, that the devices interoperate between the two.”

However, Verizon remains committed to its current internal cloud path.

“Having that on our own internal cloud allows us to continuously optimize that customer experience for both fixed and mobile customers without having to rely on another party in that equation, so we feel it’s a competitive advantage,” Koeppe said. “Other operators use public cloud for different things, that's certainly up to them based on what they're trying to accomplish.”