Mavenir today announced that its fully virtualized 4G and 5G OpenRAN offering is commercially available to operators. The Texas-based network software provider claims to be the only “end-to-end cloud-native vendor” for network operators. Mavenir’s OpenRAN interface extends virtualization to the edge of the network and enables remote radio units from multiple sources to work with baseband software in the cloud over Ethernet fronthaul.

“We now have the whole ecosystem,” Mavenir CEO Pardeep Kohli told SDxCentral. “Of course we do compete with the Ericssons and the Nokias of the world on all different layers, and now we are ready to compete with them in radio as well. So if somebody wants to build a complete end-to-end network, we actually have pretty much the same portfolio that the big guys have.”

Mavenir’s portfolio is comprised of the application layer, IP multimedia subsystems (IMS), the packet core, and radio access network (RAN) equipment housed in white boxes. “Today the radio is all in one monolithic box. You have to buy everything from one vendor and all the interfaces of the radio are proprietary,” he said. “But the actual signal processing software doesn’t need to be tied to the same vendor selling the hardware.”

That’s where Mavenir’s OpenRAN efforts come into play. Multiple open source groups are targeting the opportunities, including Mavenir’s Open RAN Partner Ecosystem, the Telecom Infra Project’s OpenRAN Initiative, the ORAN Alliance and Cisco’s Open vRAN Alliance.

These groups aren’t necessarily competing, according to Kohli, but each group has different companies driving the effort from their respective positions in the market. The prevailing goal is to reduce costs for operators by disaggregating hardware from software and making the ecosystem more open, he explained.

“We want to take advantage of making it open in the sense that there’s more players building it. That way everybody adopts it by design, in which case the overall volume increases and complexity decreases, and more players are open to build [radio units] as well,” Kohli said. “Some of these things are actually not technical at all. It's just that these are political or commercial issues to be resolved.”

Network technology and general purpose computing has reached a level where radio applications that have traditionally been processed by tightly integrated proprietary hardware and software can now be achieved with open-source software from multiple (and often smaller) vendors, he explained. “The whole idea is open in the sense that the interfaces are open so I’m not tied to one vendor.”

Vodafone and Telefonica are Mavenir’s two largest publicly announced customers to date, but the company is working with other unnamed operators as well, according to Kohli. “We’re seeing a lot more momentum now,” he said.

Numerous trials have proven that the technology works so now most operators are calculating the cost and procedural changes that would be required to bring on a new vendor like Mavenir, Kohli explained. Economics drive most decisions at operators, but the most critical and opportunistic time for operators to deploy OpenRAN infrastructure is when they need to replace and upgrade existing equipment, he said.

The company recently opened an innovation center in Stockholm, which puts it in close proximity to Ericsson’s headquarters, and demonstrated data traffic transmission over Open RAN (O-RAN) interface technology in a 5G New Radio (NR) during the formal opening of the center.

Mavenir’s OpenRAN offering supports the O-RAN 7.2 radio architecture and 3GPP Split 2 architecture with open interfaces. “We are focused purely on 4G and 5G solutions and we are offering it as a software and general purpose hardware, open interfaces, no vendor lock-in, so it’s more forward looking,” Kohli said.