KDDI, Samsung Electronics and Fujitsu announced that the companies have turned on the world's first commercial 5G Standalone Open RAN site powered by virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) in Kawasaki, Kanagawa.

Parallel Wireless, Inc., the leading U.S.-based O-RAN compliant, Open RAN company, enabling ALL Gs – 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G will showcase next-generation innovations in Open RAN at MWC Barcelona 2022, in Hall 5, booth 5C61.

Vodafone is partnering with more than 20 chip vendors on a project designed to advance the development of Open RAN processors at the firm’s new European R&D center in Spain. The facility in Malaga will specialize in developing new services based on Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Computing, Mobile Private Networks (MPN), and Open RAN. Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, ARM and Lime are among those to partner with Vodafone, with half of participants coming from Europe.

Dish Network is making its spectrum available to enterprises for private wireless deployments through a partnership with integrator WCI Technologies. The companies said they are targeting enterprise customers in the oil and gas, health care, and mining industries, among others. Once Dish launches its 5G network, the partnership will expand to include enterprise 5G services that use the public network, the companies said.

O2 / Telefónica has activated the first mini-radio cells with Open RAN technology (ORAN) in Munich. In addition to the very well developed O2 network, this will provide all O2 customers with even more capacity and higher bandwidths at busy locations in the future. The installation of pure 5G Open RAN mini radio cells ("5G standalone") will follow later in the year.

Vodafone has switched on its first commercial site featuring Open RAN elements as part of its commitment to deploy the disaggregated radio access network architecture at 2,500 sites in the UK by 2027. The site is just outside the city of Bath and is carrying live 5G traffic, says the operator.

Open radio access network (O-RAN) technology was originally developed to provide telecom carriers flexibility and cost efficiency in network deployment, but it has become a weapon used by the US to push telecom carriers worldwide to replace their existing equipment sets made by Chinese vendors, according to Digitimes Research.

Nokia announced that it has been selected by Elisa Estonia for a nationwide 5G RAN deployment in a five-year deal. Nokia will be the sole provider, replacing the incumbent vendor. Deployment is expected to roll out next year following the completion of Estonia’s spectrum auction in early 2022.

Mavenir announced the commercial availability of its 4G Open RAN small cell for outdoor deployments, expanding the MAVair radio and access portfolio of small cells to meet the growing need for enhanced network capacity and coverage.

Samsung Networks announced a collaboration with Orange for the rapid development of Open RAN technology. Per a Samsung press release, “[t]he group plans to deploy O-RAN Alliance-compliant base stations starting with indoor and rural configurations and expand to new deployments in the coming years.”

Dell Technologies introduces its Bare Metal Orchestrator software to automate the deployment and management of potentially hundreds of thousands of servers across geographic locations. Per a company release, “[t]he software offers the breadth and scale for telecom operators to automate the deployment and management of hundreds of thousands of servers across geographic locations to support O-RAN and 5G deployments.”

Intel Corporation, Juniper Networks, and Rakuten Symphony announced a collaboration to develop Symware, an Open RAN solution for mobile network operators. Symware is slated for release during the first half of 2022 through Rakuten Symphony.