Verizon has some of Samsung and the industry’s first fully virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment for mid-band spectrum packing massive MIMO. It might even be the first operator with such equipment thanks to its contract with Samsung.

Thousands of Samsung’s vRAN massive MIMO units for C-band spectrum are in Verizon’s hands, according to the vendor. Some of it’s deployed, but none of the gear will transmit or receive live 5G signals until Verizon’s first tranche of recently acquired C-band spectrum is cleared later this year. 

That combination of factors — massive MIMO radios integrated with a fully virtualized centralized unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) supporting C-band spectrum — is an important distinction at this juncture in the 5G development cycle. 

“There really is a difference here right now when it comes to our lead when it comes to massive MIMO and vRAN,” Alok Shah, Samsung’s VP of networks strategy in the U.S., told SDxCentral in a phone interview. 

“We’re in the process now of installing C-band radios into the field, and the timing for commercialization of that combination is tied to the availability of C-band spectrum. Once it gets cleared toward the end of this year, that’s when we’ll be able to light up,” he said. 

Verizon, which last year inked a $6.64 billion deal with Samsung for 5G RAN equipment, might be the first operator to have such equipment on hand. Shah declined to confirm if any other operators have received Samsung’s massive MIMO vRAN 5G equipment for C-band, but he did note that “all the C-band radios that we’re deploying right now are 64T/64R massive MIMO.” That’s the latest variant that packs 64 transmit and 64 receive antennas.

5G vRAN equipment featuring massive MIMO for mid-band spectrum will be available from Nokia around the end of this year, and Ericsson’s offering that meets that combination of attributes will begin shipping in the second half of 2022.

Massive MIMO is critically important for 5G operators as they accelerate deployments in mid-band spectrum, which promises to improve speeds and coverage. Indeed, that technology can’t currently be applied to low-band spectrum, Shah explained. 

“As you go down in spectrum, everything gets bigger. And so trying to put too many antenna elements in the low-band radio becomes prohibitively large and expensive,” he said.

Samsung has “quite a lot of experience in massive MIMO, for time-division duplex spectrum especially,” Shah said. Most of Samsung’s commercially deployed 5G mid-band radios in Korea pack massive MIMO 32T/32R, and AT&T has deployed massive MIMO radios supporting the shared 3.5 GHz band in the U.S., he added.

Verizon began commercially deploying Samsung’s 5G vRAN equipment for low-band spectrum earlier this year, but the units for mid-band spectrum are the first pieces of Samsung massive MIMO equipment also tested and integrated for a fully virtualized RAN.

“I’m sure it’s possible to do it with other mid-band massive MIMO radios we have, but I think C-band has been the first kind of case where we’ve needed to make that integration,” Shah explained. 

RAN virtualization remains a naggingly perplexing construct and equipment vendors aren’t unified in defining the architecture.

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,” Junehee Lee, Samsung Networks’ EVP and head of research and development, claimed last month in a vendor presentation.

Samsung introduced what it calls vRAN 2.0 earlier this year to mark an evolution wherein the entire baseband function is virtualized, both the CU and DU. Samsung’s early 5G RAN deployments in 2019 included a virtualized CU, but the DU was still hardware based.

“So even back at that point, we could I guess claim some virtualization because the CU element was virtualized. But when we use the term fully virtualized, we tend to refer to vDU, virtualizing the DU and CU together,” Shah said. “That’s how we would define the term.”

Verizon spent $52.9 billion to acquire and clear an average of 161 megahertz of C-band spectrum and intends to increase its capex by a cumulative $10 billion through 2023 to expand its 5G network. The operator’s current deployment plan calls for 175 million people to be covered by its mid-band 5G spectrum in 2023.