Mavenir and Turkcell Enable World’s First OpenRAN vRAN Call with Fully Containerized CU/DU and Open Front Haul

Mavenir, the industry's leading end-to-end cloud-native network software provider for CSPs, and Turkcell, Turkey’s leading digital operator today announce the world’s first OpenRAN vRAN call fully containerized with O-RAN Split 7.2 architecture, in Turkey.

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Running on Turkcell’s Telco Cloud environment, Mavenir’s OpenRAN vRAN is integrated with Turkcell Core, and is the first workload that will be going live on Turkcell’s Edge Cloud.

Mavenir’s award winning OpenRAN vRAN solution centralizes baseband processing in cloud-native virtualized and containerized baseband units (vBBU) and exploits fronthaul over ethernet between vBBU and multiple remote radio units (RRU). The Mavenir vRAN architecture and platform supports 4G as well as both 5G NR NSA and SA. The vBBU is split into Central Unit (CU) and Distributed Unit (DU) and it features O-RAN standard interfaces.

The split between the DU and the RRU gives flexibility to the RAN system by enabling an efficient interface which can be run over Ethernet and allows concentration of the processing power either into data centers or onto edge platforms. Mavenir’s OpenRAN vRAN allows a very secure and transparent interface which is based on a single architecture that can accommodate several deployment scenarios.

With these open interfaces, as well as virtualization and web scale containerization, the solution has the flexibility to support various deployment scenarios – including Public Cloud, Private Cloud and at the RRU site. It can also support massive MIMO, mmWave, edge micro services and network slicing for 5G NR.

“Mavenir is extremely proud to have supported Turkcell, which is a very innovative and advanced operator, in achieving this first call in a truly OpenRAN containerized implementation,” said Mikael Rylander, Mavenir’s SVP/GM Radio Access Products. “The standard O-RAN 7.2 interface will enable and boost the OpenRAN ecosystem significantly by allowing many RRU vendors to be deployed and to have very effective solutions in all possible frequency bands with great deployment flexibility and with automation and remote operations.”

“We strongly believe in Turkcell that innovation is the engine that allows us to be very close to our customers and meet their demands,”Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell CTO stated. “Now with OpenRAN, we are entering a new era that offers us new ways of deploying Radio Networks and create a real distributed 5G network to fulfill the expectations that the industry has. We are pleased to pioneer this technology with Mavenir by realizing world’s first containerized implementation with a truly open architecture using a mix and match of Open FH supported RRU and CU/DU which reflects the true sense of Open RAN.”

Turkcell is also transforming its LTE and 5G voice network into 100% virtual infrastructures. Mavenir was selected by Turkcell to deploy its cloud-native, NFV-based IMS solution, in Turkcell’s home country Turkey and other subsidiaries.

Mavenir’s Virtualized IMS (vIMS) solution is designed to fully support LTE use cases and evolve into a fully web-scale platform that can meet the requirements enabling Turkcell to continue to lead the evolution to its 5G networks.