Samsung and Other Tech Industry Leaders Are Collaborating to Expand the 5G vRAN Ecosystem

In a recent announcement, Samsung Electronics reveals that it will continue working with “industry-leading innovators” to expand the 5G vRAN ecosystem further. This includes companies that provide chipsets, cloud platforms, and servers. This initiative aims to operate “multiparty collaboration and innovation” to improve and advance software-based networks. Specifically, Samsung and co. are looking to push vRAN forward, ultimately making it a more scalable network.

Samsung is currently the global leader in the 5G RAN market and appears to be the only major network vendor to provide “fully-virtualized commercial RAN deployments” in various regions, including Asia, North America, and Europe. In 2020, Samsung provided dependable mobile services to millions of people in the United States by delivering 5G vRAN solutions for an extensive commercial network service. That said, the tech giant plans on further expanding its 5G vRAN footprint in the coming years.

So far, the company has successfully hit multiple milestones, including:

The network solutions provided by Samsung span from traditional RAN to virtualized RAN to Open RAN, depending on the operator’s preferences. The company’s 5G vRAN separates the baseband functions into the virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and the virtualized Central Unit (vCU).

Woojune Kim, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics, states:

Being a trailblazer of vRAN technology, Samsung gathered various industry leaders to collaborate with them, with the first few companies being Dell, HPE, Intel, Red Hat, and Wind River. According to the post, Samsung already made some tests regarding interoperability with these different platforms. The company plans on expanding the ecosystem further by bringing in more partners to share their expertise.