Samsung today made good on its pledge to release a fully virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) portfolio and said Verizon is the first operator to commercially deploy the new equipment in its network.

“We believe we’re really the first major RAN supplier to bring a 5G vRAN to commercial operation,” Alok Shah, VP of networks strategy at Samsung Electronics America, told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

Verizon, which recently signed a $6.64 billion deal with Samsung for the provision of RAN equipment through 2025, began validating Samsung’s vRAN gear last summer and activated the equipment in parts of its live 5G network as 2020 came to a close.

Samsung’s vRAN kit for 5G includes a virtualized central unit (vCU), a virtualized distributed unit (vDU), and software that allows operators to move from dedicated baseband hardware to general purpose x86-based servers. 

The vendor’s first wave of 5G equipment deployed in South Korea and the United States in 2019 included a vCU, but the DU was still hardware based. With both pieces of equipment now virtualized, Samsung describes the latest evolution of its 5G RAN equipment as vRAN 2.0.

Samsung’s “vRAN 1.0 took that CU and virtualized it, vRAN 2.0 took the DU and virtualized it, so now the entire baseband function is virtualized,” Shah said.

As such, a direct extension of that development means that Samsung considers Verizon to be the “first out of the gate with 5G on fully virtualized RAN” architecture, Shah added.

Samsung’s much larger competitors in the RAN space are also pursuing virtualization. Ericsson claims it will have a fully virtualized RAN portfolio in the fourth quarter of this year, and Nokia is also expected to release a commercial vRAN offering later this year. 

Collectively, these efforts bring Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia closer to achieving open RAN compliance in their equipment and software with some caveats.

“Operators are very interested in ensuring that more and more of the components in their network are [open RAN] compliant,” Shah said. However, he added, “for the most part, they’re not yet doing the mixing and matching” of hardware and software from multiple vendors in the same deployment. 

“That’s sort of the next level that we will get to as an industry,” Shah said. “We continue to be very supportive of open RAN. You’ll see it more and more in our portfolio and we think the industry is clearly moving in that direction.”

In the interim, Samsung’s efforts on vRAN certainly factored into Verizon’s decision to award the South Korean vendor a massive RAN contract that effectively kicked Nokia to the curb as one of Verizon’s primary RAN vendors. However, Shah notes that Samsung and Verizon have been working together on network infrastructure since 2008, and pointed to an accumulation of Samsung’s technology aligned with Verizon’s goals as the more apparent driver of that deal. 

The five-year deal, which retroactively began at the end of June 2020, could be the largest RAN contract to date for Samsung, but Shah declined to confirm it as such, describing it instead as “quite substantial for our business.” 

Samsung is also a leading RAN supplier for all three major operators in South Korea, and Jio’s macro network in India is exclusively running on Samsung RAN and core equipment, he said. “That’s a network that’s larger than Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile combined, both in terms of the number of sites and the amount of traffic.”

The vendor is, nonetheless, excited about its prospects in the U.S. market following its deal with Verizon, which is “one of the very few operators in the world that has universal respect for its network,” Shah said. Samsung is also pursuing opportunities in private networks, indoor deployments, rural broadband, and services that run on shared spectrum. 

“There are just a multitude of different opportunities for us here, and being partnered with Verizon certainly helps our credibility here and globally,” he said.