Mavenir chalked up another operator partnership with the announcement that Turkcell is to test and deploy the vendor's virtual RAN (vRAN) open RAN product within the Turkcell Group, starting in Turkey.

Mavenir said the vRAN solution will be deployed on the Turkcell Telco Cloud, and "will be [the] first workload that will be going live on Turkcell Edge Cloud."

Turkcell is already making strides towards virtualizing its network. Gediz Sezgin, CTO of Turkcell, said the operator has reached "more than 60% virtualization in our mobile core network. We already take great advantage of what virtualization has to offer and are willing to extend the benefits of virtualization coupled with open RAN."

Want to know more about 5G? Check out our dedicated 5G content channel here on Light Reading.

The operator also prides itself on its strong digitalization credentials, recently reporting an ARPU performance driven by technologies which, it says, enable it "to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time." (See Turkcell trumpets 'record' mobile ARPU growth in Q4.)

Mavenir, like rivals such as Parallel Wireless, is an open RAN proponent that is aiming to upend the traditional relationship between vendors and operators. Bigger vendors, including Ericsson and Huawei, have been less enthusiastic about the technology for what are perhaps obvious, and in many cases valid, reasons. However, they are coming under increasing pressure, as demonstrated by a recent breakthrough by Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Intel. (See Deutsche Telekom, Intel breakthrough piles open RAN pressure onto big vendors.)

Furthermore, the Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the O-RAN Alliance have finally combined their efforts in what one senior DT executive has described as a "high-level harmonization." (See Facebook-led TIP and O-RAN Alliance finally buddy up on 5G R&D.)

For more on this topic, see:

— Anne Morris, contributing editor, special to Light Reading