Mavenir puts down open RAN R&D roots in Germany

Mavenir has established an "Open RAN Center of Excellence" in Bonn, Germany. By happy coincidence, Bonn is also where Deutsche Telekom is headquartered, a telco with which Mavenir is developing close open RAN ties.

Although the open RAN facility is centered in Bonn, there are also "satellite teams" in Düsseldorf and Munich. Vodafone Germany is headquartered in Düsseldorf, while O2 Germany – which together make up the country's "big three" mobile network operators – is based in Munich.

The new center, explained Mavenir, will support European MNOs with open RAN engineering, planning, design, system integration and deployment.

"This latest Center of Excellence further extends access to Mavenir's open RAN expertise across Europe and complements existing R&D design centers of excellence in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom," asserted Puneet Sethi, SVP and general manager of Mavenir's RAN Business.

Figure 1: The new center will support European MNOs with open RAN engineering, planning, design, system integration and deployment.
(Source: Mavenir)

Mavenir approvingly noted that Germany is chipping in with taxpayers' money to assist open RAN R&D. Germany's Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure recently announced €300 million (US$344 million) in funding – as part of Germany's economic stimulus package – to develop and test the nascent open RAN tech.

It was not clear from the official announcement if Mavenir was given any financial incentives to put down open RAN R&D roots in Germany.

German open RAN ties

Mavenir is in the multi-vendor mix for Deutsche Telekom's O-RAN Town deployment in Neubrandenburg. It supplies cloud-native baseband software for 4G and 5G distributed units (O-DU) and central units (O-CU), including mMIMO RUs. The German incumbent intends to start rolling out open RAN in earnest next year.

Last year, in collaboration with Vodafone and Nokia, Mavenir joined forces with the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure to pursue a new project to transform Saxony's Plauen into what the participants are dubbing an "open RAN city."

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Vodafone is supplying the network, Nokia its RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform and Mavenir an open RAN-compliant 4G and 5G system.

In February this year Mavenir announced its OpenBeam portfolio of O-RAN compliant radio products. According to the US supplier, its OpenBeam-branded kit provides MNOs with open RAN solutions spanning micro, macro, millimeter wave, as well as massive MIMO use cases.

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— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading