Airtel Partners With Mavenir to Test O-RAN Based 5G NSA Network

Indian telecommunications services company Bharti Airtel in partnership with Mavenir has successfully conducted India’s first Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) based live 5G network validation. Mavenir is the Network Software Provider building the future of networks with cloud-native software that runs on any cloud and transforms the way the world connects.

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The Open RAN Ecosystem

The Mavenir Open Virtualised Radio Access Network (Open vRAN) solution is based on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. It includes 3500MHz Radio employing open interfaces as defined by O-RAN Alliance. With Open vRAN, Airtel will now be capable of leveraging virtualisation and web-scale containerisation to support an ‘any cloud’ deployment scenario. In addition to this, the Open vRAN not only brings network elasticity but also eliminates vendor lock-in.

The CTO of Bharti Airtel Randeep Sekhon in a statement said that this is yet another validation of the growing readiness of 5G networks based on open architecture and is nothing less of a milestone for the Open RAN ecosystem in India. He said that Airtel is now leading the innovation efforts of the O-RAN Alliance in India and is looking forward to strengthening its technology partnership with Mavenir. He said that the company plans to collaborate further to accelerate the deployment of these radio access networks.

The Open RAN based 5G validation was conducted in Chandigarh and Mohali. The Department of Telecommunications, Government of India has allotted Airtel with the 3500 MHz band test spectrum over which the validation was conducted. Notably, during the process speeds of over 1 Gbps were validated with the equipment deployed and with the use of commercial mobile devices.