‘Ready to deliver a cloud-native Packet Core platform’
Vodafone Portugal will use Mavenir’s 5G Converged Packet Core in its 5G Standalone (SA) service buildout, the companies said in a statement on Monday. Mavenir’s 5G Converged Packet Core is part of its MAVcore platform. Mavenir emphasizes MAVcore’s open standards-based API support, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)-based network automation and scaling, and a common core that serves all types of access, mobile and wireline.
5G SA brings new technology to bear for CSPs, said Paulino Correa, Network Director of Vodafone Portugal. He said that Vodafone Portugal and Mavenir have been working on 5G SA for over a year in the lab and are now “ready to deliver a cloud-native Packet Core platform that will transform our network and prepare it for powerful applications and differentiating use cases, as the 5G solution evolves,” he said.
Vodafone UK and Mavenir recently collaborated to complete the first VoLTE call over a containerized Open RAN solution. Achieved in a lab environment, the results are the product of a previously announced partnership between the companies, in which the pair are using Open RAN systems to expand in-building 4G coverage for medium- and large-sized enterprise facilities.
In January Vodafone UK also claimed the first operating Open RAN site in the UK. The site installed in the city of Bath is the first of 2,500 5G and 4G O-RAN sites that Vodafone committed to deploy as part of the U.K. government’s ambition to accelerate the development of the Open RAN ecosystem. Vodafone said that the 2,500 sites are expected to be fully deployed by 2027.
Mavenir and IBM are putting their weight behind large-scale Open RAN deployments. The two companies announced a partnership in March to integrate network automation products. Mavenir’s Open RAN and Core portfolios and IBM’s Cloud Pak for Network Automation are the two integration targets.
“The goal of this collaboration is to enable 5G operators to deploy Open RAN base stations faster than traditional base stations,” said Mavenir.
This week, Mavenir saw a win in India, where it claims the first Open RAN-based 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) validation. The Mavenir Open Virtualized Radio Access Network (Open vRAN) solution is based on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The O-RAN-based 5G validation has been conducted in Chandigarh and Mohali, using the 3,500 MHz band test spectrum allotted to Airtel by the Department of Telecom (DoT). Speeds of over 1 Gbps were validated with the equipment deployed and configured in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode and using commercially available 5G mobile devices.
