Samsung Networks doesn’t seem as perturbed by the choppy seas of the telecom network equipment market as its rivals, Ericsson and Nokia, do, at the moment.
“We are continuing to expand our network footprint globally and are leading in [virtualized] RAN and Open RAN across North America, Asia and Europe,” Amresh Singh, director of partnerships at the networks business of Samsung Electronics America, told Silverlinings in an email.
Part of the reason for Samsung’s confidence may be because it doesn’t have to serve as many 4G LTE legacy operators as the Scandinavian duo do.
“While Dell’Oro is predicting a small decline in the overall [radio access network] market, this is mostly driven by reductions in 4G LTE revenues, while 5G is projected to grow another 20 to 30% by 2027,” Singh noted.
Samsung looks toward the cloud
Looking forward to a mostly cloud-native future, Singh highlighted virtualization as the most important aspect of modern 5G networks over the next couple of years.
“We believe that virtualization is the future of networks, and as a pioneer in the technology, Samsung is continuing to innovate our vRAN solution to support the needs of forward-looking operators,” he said. “We recently announced vRAN 3.0 – the latest and most advanced version of our vRAN solution.”
Singh said the latest version of the software drives greater energy savings and performance optimization for operators with features such as increased bandwidth support for massive MIMO radios, an automated sleep mode to preserve energy and the ability to analyze hourly traffic patterns.
Singh added that the software will play a role in commercializing end-to-end network slicing. He said the vRAN software already supports dynamic network slicing with the ability to bring those slices up and down quickly. “It allows operators to efficiently allocate network and spectral resources on a per-slice basis, with features crafted specifically for various use case support,” he said.
Derek Johnston, head of 5G business and marketing at Samsung, has already told Silverlinings that Verizon is using Samsung for 5G vRAN. He said that the operator is intending to deploy 20,000 vRAN sites by 2025.
Singh couldn’t comment on exactly when Verizon would upgrade to vRAN 3.0. “Generally speaking, depending on the customer, Samsung provides one to two major software updates per year, and features, updates and fixes as needed at intervals agreed upon with the customer,” he said.
Meanwhile, Samsung has “collaborated with many ecosystem vendors” on Dish Network’s standalone 5G rollout. “For example, as was publicly announced, Samsung’s Open RAN compliant vRAN software is integrated with VMware Telco Cloud Platform, Dell’s EMC PowerEdge servers and associated software and AWS infrastructure, as part of the...buildout,” Singh said.
“Samsung has demonstrated our willingness to work closely with leading operators around the world to build disaggregated and flexible next-generation networks that perform at a high level,” Singh concluded.
Want to learn more about cloud-native 5G networks? Check out our Cloud-Native 5G Summit on demand now.