SEOUL, Korea – June 8, 2021 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today announced that its commercial 5G virtualized RAN(vRAN) now supports its latest C-Band Massive MIMO radios, a first for the industry and a key milestone in virtualization technology. Additionally, the company achieved a top 5G vRAN speed exceeding 1.5Gbps on C-Band spectrum. With these results – performed in a demonstration at Samsung’s lab in Korea – the company continues to expand the limits of vRAN performance from low-band support last year to mid-band today. Samsung is also currently conducting field trials using these products, and plans to commercialize the solution this year.
The demonstration leveraged E-UTRAN New Radio Dual Connectivity (EN-DC) technology combining 40MHz of 4G frequency and 100MHz of 5G frequency on the C-Band spectrum. Through the dual connectivity approach, Samsung achieved 2.25Gbps overall on a single user device. For the demonstration, Samsung used its latest virtualized RAN, C-Band 64T64R Massive MIMO radio, and cloud-native 5G Core. Samsung’s vRAN, which is already in use providing services on low-band spectrum in the U.S., proved its capability to support Massive MIMO radios through this achievement.