Following Three’s installation of 18 Open RAN small cell sites in Glasgow City Centre, the project will now expand that to 34, says Mavenir.
Last week Three completed a live trial involving 18 small cells deployed in in Glasgow City Centre, marking what they said was the first Open RAN deployment in a dense UK urban environment.
Installed on lampposts, the sites apparently doubled 4G and 5G throughput during peak times, with 5G speeds topping out at 520 Mbps. The Open RAN sites also shouldered some of the burden on macro sites, easing overall network congestion in the city, we were told.
Mavenir, which was involved in the rollout, today announced that the project will now move into its final deployment phase, which will involve increasing the number of Open RAN small cell sites to 34.
Mavenir’s roll out of a small cell densification layer for Three UK is being delivered as part of the SCONDA (Small Cells O-RAN in Dense Areas) project, which is an initiative backed by the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
The project involves Mavenir delivering its OpenBeam small cell radios running on Red Hat OpenShift. Meanwhile Three is using Red Hat OpenShift to build and deliver the Open vRAN network which is integrated into the existing 4G core and operating alongside the operator’s traditional RAN, says today’s release.
“This network densification project proves that the Open RAN layer built by Mavenir can efficiently and effectively meet the needs of Three UK and its customers in one of the busiest cities in the UK,” said Brandon Larson, SVP, Cloud and AI at Mavenir. “Our solution has delivered a 2x improvement in 5G speeds, a measurable uplift in capacity, and handover of customer traffic has been outstanding.
“This powerfully demonstrates that Open RAN can be fully integrated alongside traditional vendors – a breakthrough that will get the attention of radio network design teams around the world for the cost savings and flexibility it offers.”
Iain Milligan, Chief Network Officer at Three UK added “Mavenir and Red Hat have been exceptional partners on this groundbreaking project – the UK’s first Open RAN trial to tackle the real-world complexity of a dense urban environment. We have pushed the boundaries and proven that the Open RAN approach is a hugely valuable addition to network design and deployment.”
Meanwhile talking of small cells, yesterday EE and Ontix announced they have installed 80 of them across the City of Westminster, which support both 4G and 5G traffic. The project is supposed to help out EE connectivity in Westminster, which is apparently home to more than 50,000 businesses and has over 25 million visiting tourists each year.
