MWC23: DT Plans First Commercial Deployment of Open RAN

For the next phase of its open RAN journey, Deutsche Telekom will partner with Nokia, Fujitsu, and Mavenir among others for initial commercial deployments across its European footprint. Nokia and Fujitsu have been chosen as partners for an initial commercial open RAN introduction in Germany from 2023 onwards.

Customers in the Neubrandenburg area will receive 2G, 4G, and 5G services from the deployment in the ‘brownfield’ network environment of Telekom Deutschland. In addition, Mavenir has been chosen as a partner for an initial multi-vendor deployment in DT’s European footprint starting in 2023.

“Open RAN is critical to Deutsche Telekom’s strategy to foster greater vendor diversity and accelerate customer-focused innovation in the radio access network,“ said Claudia Nemat, Board Member for Technology and Innovation. “We are committed to open RAN as the technology of choice for future networks and as a catalyst to take Europe forward in the digital era, so we are making it happen with partners. “

“Open RAN has matured over the last months in both stability and performance, which has given us the confidence for an initial commercial deployment. Together with Nokia, Mavenir, and other ecosystem partners, we will use our collaboration as the springboard to accelerate open RAN development and create a path to deployment at scale,“ added Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom Group CTO & CTO Germany.

Traditional radio access networks are deployed as integrated solutions from one vendor. Open RAN unlocks some of the interface gates between different parts of the radio access network so operators can introduce components from different vendors. The open fronthaul interface, defined by the O-RAN ALLIANCE and now adopted by ETSI, allows interoperability between these components. Operators can therefore combine a baseband unit from one vendor with a radio unit from another vendor on one site.

The sites at Neubrandenburg are built on a multi-vendor open RAN architecture with open fronthaul support and equipment from Nokia and Fujitsu. Nokia will deliver the baseband units. The O-RAN-compliant remote Radio Units (O-RUs) will be provided by Nokia and Fujitsu. For further deployments in the European footprint, Mavenir will provide the Cloud-Native baseband software for the 4G and 5G distributed units (O-DU) and central units (O-CU), including for the open fronthaul based mMIMO radio units. Other partners are to be announced in due course.

DT has pioneered open RAN since it co-founded the xRAN Forum in 2016, which led to the formation of the telco-led O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2018. In 2021, DT initiated its O-RAN Town pilot in Neubrandenburg to test, assess and gain operational experience from a high-power multivendor deployment in a brownfield network. DT has also been working together with other leading European operators to advance the open RAN ecosystem and solution development.