Verizon uses open RAN to connect Samsung with CommScopeVerizon uses open RAN to connect Samsung with CommScope

Verizon announced it is using open RAN interfaces to link Samsung equipment with equipment from CommScope. The company boasted that the deployment, in two locations in Austin, Texas, are its first multi-vendor open RAN deployments.

"The massive evolution of our network over the past few years including our move to a cloud-based architecture, widespread virtualization and our aggressive adoption of O-RAN standards and capabilities has enabled us to show O-RAN interoperability success in a commercial environment," said Adam Koeppe, Verizon's SVP of technology planning, in a release.

Verizon's announcement is important because most major open RAN deployments among established operators so far feature just a single vendor. That situation has sparked some concerns among early open RAN proponents that had hoped the technology would open the RAN door to more vendors.

"A company can call its offering 'open RAN' without actually satisfying the criteria to be truly open RAN. These vendors refer to themselves as single suppliers of open RAN, and they threaten to upend the benefits that open RAN offers," explained John Baker, a top executive with open RAN vendor Mavenir, in testimony earlier this year to a House subcommittee.

Indeed, AT&T's huge $14 billion contract with Ericsson spans most products, including radios and baseband systems. While Fujitsu was also named in AT&T's open RAN announcement, its role remains unclear, and it has had a 5G partnership with Ericsson since 2018.

Outside North America, Vodafone UK has started work on a 2,500-site deployment of open RAN technology to replace Huawei. Vodafone is purchasing both baseband software and radios from the same vendor: Samsung.

According to research firm Dell'Oro Group, this kind of single-vendor open RAN is expected to drive the lion's share of the open RAN market. The firm predicted that multi-vendor open RAN will account for just 5-10% of total radio access network (RAN) revenues by 2028.

As for Verizon, the company again said it "has been driving the adoption of O-RAN for years," and it touted more than 130,000 O-RAN capable radios in its network.

In its Austin deployment, Verizon said it used O-RAN Alliance interfaces to hook a Samsung virtualized distributed unit (vDU) to a Commscope DAS (distributed antenna system) inside the University of Texas Moody Center and the Austin Convention Center. DAS systems like those supplied by CommScope are often deployed inside large buildings to ensure indoor coverage.