KDDI to expand Open RAN deployments with Samsung

Japan’s second largest operator, KDDI, has chosen Samsung Electronics as the main vendor to expand on its existing Open RAN deployment, which it first launched in January 2023. The move will see Samsung providing a suite of 4G and 5G O-RAN compliant virtualised RAN (vRAN) solutions including network management which will be provided by Samsung’s Service Management Orchestration (SMO) platform CognitiV Networks Operations Suite (NOS). 

The deal also sees Samsung providing KDDI with O-RAN compliant radios supporting low and mid-bands including advanced Massive MIMO radios and third party radio integration. The news will come as a blow to Fujitsu who had previously supplied the Massive MIMO radios for KDDI’s first open RAN deployments.

Samsung also announced it will bring on board some of its industry partners to deliver the fully disaggregated and software-based architecture vRAN offering for KDDI. Servers will be provided by HPE, processors by Intel and Red Hat will provide the cloud platform. The deployment is expected to begin at the start of next year.

KDDI is been a leading proponent of open and disaggregated technologies to improve efficiencies throughout its network. Last year it became the first operator to deploy the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) incubated Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Router (DDBR) in its core network. The move has seen it reduce power consumption by about 46% and rack space by about 40% compared to the traditional routers in KDDI production networks.