Telus said that the commercial deployment of this technology will begin in the first half of this year

Canadian operator Telus and Samsung Electronics announced that they will build what they say will be Canada’s first commercial virtualized and Open RAN (O-RAN) network.

The companies said they are expanding their collaboration from greenfield to brownfield deployments.

The partners also noted that this deployment will be the first truly virtualized O-RAN deployment within a brownfield network environment.

With O-RAN, Telus said it will be able to use components from different manufacturers, while a virtualized radio access network (vRAN) allows the use of software instead of hardware.

“This is a very exciting milestone for Telus and the industry overall, as we now have the most flexible way to offer a diversified set of services to Canadians, unlocking new levels of mobile experiences,” said Nazim Benhadid, chief technology officer at Telus.

Telus and Samsung said they have extensively tested both the vRAN and O-RAN rollout in Canadian markets validating the telco-grade performance and reliability of multi-vendor O-RAN technology, powered by Samsung’s vRAN solutions.

The commercial deployment of this technology will begin in the first half of this year and a large-scale network rollout is expected to begin by mid-2024.

Under the terms of this expanded collaboration, Samsung will deliver its vRAN software and O-RAN compliant solutions, including its 64T64R Massive MIMO radios, as well as the support for third-party radio integration.

Samsung’s solutions include its latest vRAN 3.0 for 4G and 5G, which features enhanced capabilities for improved energy savings, optimized performance and intelligent automation via Samsung’s Service Management and Orchestration (SMO).

Also,  cloud infrastructure will be provided by Wind River while Hewlett Packard Enterprise will deliver HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 servers featuring fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor with Intel vRAN Boost, that are workload optimized for O-RAN while being open and flexible, providing the foundation for a Distributed Unit (DU).

Last month, Ericsson partnered with Telus to launch and optimize its 5G Standalone (5G SA) network at a national level. The 5G SA network will be delivered through Ericsson’s cloud-native, dual-mode 5G core solution and enable advanced 5G services, the vendor said.

In June 2022, Telus had started to deploy its 3.5 GHz spectrum on its existing 5G wireless network to provide enhanced capacity, low latency and faster speeds to its customers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton and Victoria.

Telus noted that its 3.5 GHz spectrum will enable multi-access edge computing (MEC) and Internet of Things (IoT) technology, while powering important advances in health, agriculture, energy, transportation, and manufacturing.

Telus had previously selected Samsung Electronics as its 5G network infrastructure supplier in June 2020. Telus also said that European vendors Ericsson and Nokia had also supported the deployment of its 5G network.