Verizon and Samsung successfully completed a fully virtualized 5G data session on the operator’s recently acquired C-band spectrum in three locations. It marks another accomplishment that puts Verizon in position to be the first operator with fully virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment packing massive MIMO.

The carrier is readying deployment and commercial use of Samsung’s massive MIMO 5G radios for C-band spectrum later this year when the first tranche of spectrum is cleared. The vendor, which landed a $6.64 billion deal to supply Verizon with 5G RAN equipment through 2025, claims to be the first company in the telecom industry to support interoperability between vRAN and massive MIMO radios. 

The trial, which was conducted in Texas, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, “reached speeds commensurate with more traditional baseband-radio configurations,” Mike Kondratiuk, Verizon’s director of RAN planning, wrote in response to questions. “We’re very pleased to see the added benefits of virtualization with no significant impact to speed or throughput." 

Samsung’s 64T/64R massive MIMO radios were paired with Samsung’s software stack and run in coordination with Verizon’s virtualized core during the trial, but other vendors are also contributing to Verizon’s vRAN architecture.

“We continue to work with a wide variety of vendors for our orchestration efforts across the core and RAN,” Kondratiuk explained. “With the integration of the virtualization in the RAN, our entire architecture will reflect the move to Kubernetes and container-based cloud-native design.”

Verizon last summer claimed to initiate the world’s first completely virtualized 5G data session — from the network core, to the RAN, and the edge of the network, with an assist from Samsung, Intel, and Wind River. Intel supplied its Xeon Scalable processor, FPGA acceleration card, and FlexRAN reference software, while Wind River contributed its Kubernetes and container-based middleware.

The carrier has yet to deploy a 5G standalone (SA) core, and it declined to provide updates on that effort. Verizon completed a crucial 5G SA core test last summer and said network traffic would start hitting the new core before the end of 2020. Full commercialization is slated for sometime in 2021, but it hasn’t provided updates on that for more than a year.

Several vendors are involved in Verizon’s 5G SA core, but it hasn’t named any. About 95% of all live 5G networks today are running in non-standalone mode, relying on 4G LTE architecture. 

Verizon also declined to share how much of its mid-band 5G network will be running on Samsung equipment this year, but it appears likely that Samsung radios will carry the bulk of Verizon’s mid-band 5G traffic traversing virtualized architecture at the end of the year. Ericsson’s mid-band radios packing massive MIMO won’t be released until the end of this year, and the Swedish vendor won’t support integration with virtualized baseband functions until the second half of 2022.

“We will extensively deploy virtualized massive MIMO equipment across the whole of our network,” Kondratiuk said. “We will deploy vRAN with Ericsson after it has been tested and meets Verizon’s requirements.”

Samsung and Ericsson, which recently inked an $8.3 billion RAN deal with Verizon, are the carrier’s primary RAN vendors and will likely earn the bulk of Verizon’s 5G infrastructure spending through the remainder of this decade.

Verizon began commercially deploying Samsung’s 5G vRAN equipment for low-band spectrum earlier this year. Thousands of Samsung’s vRAN massive MIMO units for C-band spectrum are also in Verizon’s hands and some of it is deployed, Alok Shah, Samsung’s VP of networks strategy in the U.S., told SDxCentral in a recent interview.

The carrier has also deployed Ericsson radios for mid-band 5G, but those units feature a previous generation of massive MIMO. 

Verizon executives, during last week’s earnings call, said it has all of the radios needed to activate 7,000 to 8,000 sites by the end of this year. The operator claimed its mid-band 5G deployment activity is on pace to cover 100 people in 46 U.S. markets within the next nine months. 

“Incorporating full, cloud-native virtualization, massive MIMO, and beamforming into our network design and deployment will result in so much more than our customers merely seeing a 5G icon on their devices. This is 5G service optimized for peak performance,” Adam Koeppe, SVP of technology planning at Verizon, said in a statement.