Deutsche Telekom is an advocate of Open RAN, a founding member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and one of the major operators who signed an Open RAN MOU earlier this year to prioritise deployments and foster greater investment in Open RAN technologies. The O-RAN Town project refers to the initial deployment of disaggregated RAN for serving approximately 65,000 residents in Neubrandenburg, a town north of Berlin, in preparation for the operator's future mass deployment.

In this project, NEC will provide its 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with beam-forming technologies. The implementation of this mMIMO RU will help increase and dynamically optimise the operator's capacity depending on the actual traffic volume.

Mavenir will provide the container-based centralised units (CU) and distributed units (DU) of the disaggregated RAN as a software. Mavenir offers a wide choice of cloud-native CU and DU solutions, built on open interfaces. Working together with NEC, Mavenir is expanding its leadership to Open RAN mMIMO solutions.

Following the first step of successfully integrating NEC mMIMO antennae into the DTAG live network, NEC's and Mavenir's Open RAN experts will jointly work to provide comprehensive validation and optimisation of 5G Open RAN interoperability, as well as end-to-end functional and operational performance in the lab and field, ensuring full commercial readiness for deployments in Europe.

Telekom Germany senior vice president, service & platform and Deutsche Telekom Group head of Open RAN Abdurazak Mudesir said, "Open RAN is about increasing flexibility, choice and innovation to ensure a more customer-centric network of the future.

"We are happy to partner with Mavenir and NEC for the European first live implementation of massive MIMO at O-RAN Town, where our key priority is to drive the development of high performance multi-vendor open RAN to be a competitive solution for macro deployment at scale."

Mavenir president and CEO Pardeep Kohli said, "We appreciate the industry changing opportunity that Deutsche Telekom's O-RAN Town offers, and are glad to work together with our partner NEC to launch one of the first Open RAN mMIMO networks.

"Together with our partners, we are excited to showcase how open interfaces and cloud-native technologies accelerate innovation in RAN infrastructure areas such as mMIMO."

NEC Corporation senior vice president Nozomu Watanabe said, "We are honoured to contribute to Deutsche Telekom's highly strategic initiative in collaboration with Mavenir.

"Capitalising on our experiences gained from contributing to the world's first commercial launch of Open RAN in Japan, we are thrilled to extend our capabilities to accelerate best-in-class, carrier-grade Open RAN deployment across the globe."