Written by Ray Le Maistre
This year is ending with a bit of an Open RAN flurry. Following the jaw-dropping news that AT&T has opted to splurge $14bn on Open RAN-enabled 5G gear from Ericsson and friends (including Fujitsu) – a move that all but killed Nokia’s role as a 5G radio access network (RAN) supplier to the giant US telco – Deutsche Telekom (DT) is moving ahead with its initial commercial Open RAN deployments in Neubrandenburg, a town of about 65,000 residents north of Berlin, with Nokia and Fujitsu.
Plans for the rollout were initially announced at Mobile World Congress in February this year, shortly after DT had published a whitepaper that set out its Open RAN strategy. That whitepaper put to bed suggestions that the giant German operator might abandon its Open RAN plans following disappointing initial trials in Neubrandenburg, which the telco had dubbed O-RAN Town.
The initial multivendor Neubrandenburg deployment (the scale of which is not known) will feature Nokia’s 5G AirScale baseband solution and Fujitsu radio units to deliver 2G, 4G and 5G services, and will be “extended” from the first quarter of next year, noted Nokia in this announcement. Nokia added that it is replacing “the incumbent vendor” (Huawei) with the deployment and is also now working with DT on Open RAN-related cloud RAN, RAN intelligent controller (RIC), service management and orchestration (SMO), energy efficiency and third-party containers-as-a-service (CaaS) technology options.
