The new year is kicking off with a major milestone in 5G commercial service, as live 5G networks using C-Band spectrum come online this week in the U.S. By leveraging this critical mid-band spectrum, these 5G services will enable consumers and businesses to experience the enhanced, immersive services enabled through high speed, low latency 5G communications.
With this, Samsung’s Networks business is proud to support Verizon’s successful launch of their first 5G C-band commercial service (3.7-3.98 GHz mid-band), announced today. Included in this state-of-the art network are Samsung’s powerful 5G Massive MIMO C-Band radios and a technology that is pushing 5G’s boundaries, optimizing capabilities, and enabling faster network buildouts – virtualized RAN (vRAN).
Benefits of Virtualized 5G Networks
When it comes to mobile network deployments, software-based vRAN is a cornerstone technology, enabling operators to more easily and efficiently turn-up all network elements. Additionally, a software-based approach provides greater flexibility in allocating resources based on traffic conditions and more effective management of 5G networks.
Moreover, by running on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers, virtualization future-proofs networks, while enabling performance levels and features that are equivalent to networks that use traditional hardware-based equipment. Using a cloud-native container-based architecture, Samsung’s vRAN advances use of important capabilities such as analytics and network slicing.
This is why vRAN is critical to 5G’s commercial advancement – and has driven Samsung to become the leader in applying this new paradigm to 5G’s rollout. Enabling vRAN use in both low and mid-band spectrums, as well as indoors and outdoors, Samsung is the only major network vendor that has conducted vRAN commercial deployments with tier one operators in North America, Europe and Asia.
Key aspects of Samsung’s vRAN approach – which have helped drive the advance of C-Band deployment and make 5G reality – include innovations for improved management flexibility and resource allocation. By virtualizing RAN functionality and separating network functions from hardware operators gain the flexibility to allocate resources independently and in a specific manner. Whereas network elements like distributed units (DU) can face load imbalance issues when using conventional hardware, Samsung’s vRAN resources can be easily assigned to each DU, mitigating load misbalancing.
In addition, with optimally-placed radio resources, a virtualized architecture allows operators to shift network capacity based on changing traffic patterns. For example, radios supporting a stadium can deliver capacity to an adjacent multi-dwelling building when not used to support an event. Virtualization enables this change to take place via software commands, as opposed to the crew and truck roll used with conventional hardware.
Essential Tech for Mid-band 5G Deployments
Mid-band spectrum like C-band is critical to balancing the performance and coverage necessary for 5G’s rollout. And a central element to this successful rollout is radio technology – specifically Massive MIMO.
Massive MIMO uses many transmit and receive antenna elements to deliver the increased bandwidth associated with the large swaths of mid-band spectrum. Coupling Massive MIMO’s ability to deliver 5G performance across many users with vRAN’s capacity to flexibly scale network resources based on traffic conditions enables network operators to deliver best-in-class service and new services seamlessly.
While many in the industry were skeptical on vRAN’s ability to handle Massive MIMO in a wide-bandwidth spectrum like C-Band and 3.5GHz, Samsung has successfully proved MIMO’s powerful performance as supported by vRAN – and its equivalence to a dedicated hardware approach. As the leader in vRAN technology—and the only vendor providing a commercial vRAN that supports Massive MIMO radios in C-band—we’re excited to help deliver on the promise of next-generation networks.
Consumers and enterprises will now be able to unlock the full potential of 5G, whether through new user experiences enhanced by augmented and virtual reality and 4K/ 8K video streaming or via improved business practices transformed by IoT and big data analytics. As 5G C-Band networks come online in 2022, the journey is just beginning.