Samsung Networks, just two years into the 5G era, “already signed more 5G contracts than we did for 4G, and we’ve shipped over 4 million 5G-ready radios,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, president and head of the business unit.

Virtualization, in-house chips, and software form the foundation of Samsung’s rise amid global 5G adoption, he said during a presentation.

“We’ve been supplying 5G products with our own in-house SoCs [system-on-a-chip] since 2019. The number of first-generation 5G SoCs shipped has now passed the 200,000 mark,” Cheun said. 

Samsung’s virtualized core is also widely deployed, carrying more than 15% of all global mobile traffic, according to Cheun. “We’re the only major vendor to have commercialized a wide scale virtualized RAN with a tier-one operator in the U.S.,” he added, referring to Samsung’s work with Verizon.

The Korean vendor last year inked a $6.64 billion deal with Verizon to provide the operator with 5G RAN equipment through 2025. Samsung won that massive contract after Verizon ended the bulk of its business with Nokia and split its RAN contract between Ericsson and Samsung.

The company also this year won new deals with NTT DoCoMo for 5G RAN and gained a foothold in Vodafone UK’s 5G open RAN deployment.

Samsung released its first 5G vRAN portfolio earlier this year and recently shared plans to release virtualized 5G massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radios that support mid-band spectrum in early 2022. Ericsson this week said it will release vRAN massive MIMO radios in the second half of 2022.

“Virtualization is the replacement of dedicated hardware with software,” Woojune Kim, EVP and head of global sales and marketing at Samsung Networks, said during the company’s event.

Samsung’s fully virtualized RAN and core adheres to cloud-native architecture, and “we are the first company in the industry to offer interoperability between vRAN and massive MIMO radios,” claimed Junehee Lee, Samsung Networks’ EVP and head of research and development.

The vendor’s first virtualized core hit the market in 2015. It deployed the world’s first virtualized non-standalone 5G core in 2019, and “now we’re preparing to launch our 5G standalone (SA) core,” Lee said. “We’re confident that our 5G SA core is ready to fully meet the massive data traffic of the 5G era.”

Samsung is also preparing to release 3GPP compliant and microservices-based network slicing software, according to Lee.

“Even as the move to software becomes a distinct feature of next-generation networks, radios on top of towers still require specialized hardware that depend on semiconductor chips. This is more important as you move to a 5G world where complex technologies such as massive MIMO have to be put into smaller and greener boxes,” Kim said. 

Samsung revealed a series of new chipsets that will be packaged into its compact macro radios, massive MIMO radios, and baseband units hitting the market next year. This includes Samsung’s third-generation millimeter-wave radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) chip, a second-generation 5G modem SoC, and a digital front end-RFIC integrated chip.

The company also showcased its One Antenna Radio that features integrated antennas, including massive MIMO for mid-band deployments and passive antennas that support sub-3GHz spectrum. The radio will initially target the European market in early 2022, according to Samsung. 

Samsung recently told SDxCentral that internal analysis concluded that a centralized vRAN deployment can reduce operators’ total cost of ownership by 13% and opex by 25% over the the duration of a five-year period compared to a distributed RAN architecture. The company claims its vRAN offering proves that virtualization can achieve performance on par with traditional RAN equipment.

Samsung earned enough telecom revenue during the first quarter of 2021 to pass Ciena in a ranking of global telecom equipment suppliers, making it the sixth-largest telecom vendor with a 3% market share, according to Dell’Oro Group.