Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Vodafone, in collaboration with AMD, announced that the three companies have successfully demonstrated an end-to-end call with the latest AMD processors enabling Open RAN technology, a first for the industry. This joint achievement represents the companies’ technical leadership in enriching the Open RAN ecosystem throughout the industry.
Conducted in Samsung’s R&D lab in Korea, the first call was completed using Samsung’s versatile, O-RAN-compliant, virtualized RAN (vRAN) software, powered by AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors on Supermicro’s Telco/Edge servers, supported by Wind River Studio Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform. This demonstration aimed to verify optimized performance, energy efficiency and interoperability among partners’ solutions.
The joint demonstration represents Samsung and Vodafone’s ongoing commitment to reinforce their position in the Open RAN market and expand their ecosystem with industry-leading partners. This broader and growing Open RAN ecosystem helps operators to build and modernize mobile networks with greater flexibility, faster time-to-market (TTM), and unmatched performance.
“Open RAN represents the forthcoming major transformation in advancing mobile networks for the future. Reaching this milestone with top industry partners like Samsung and AMD shows Vodafone’s dedication to delivering on the promise of Open RAN innovation,” said Nadia Benabdallah, Network Strategy and Engineering Director at Vodafone Group. “Vodafone is continually looking to innovate its network by exploring the potential and diversity of the ecosystem.”
“This collective effort marks a key milestone for the mobile network industry to steer Open RAN forward, by embracing multiple providers at every layer of the network stack. The demo illustrates Samsung’s commitment to delivering the full potential of mobile networks by embracing openness,” said June Moon, Executive Vice President & Head of R&D, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung is constantly working with other technology frontrunners to offer operators the means to transform their networks and capitalize on the diversity of the Open RAN ecosystem.”
“The telco industry continues to demand new levels of performance and energy efficiency with increasingly complex workloads and stringent efficiency targets,” said Kumaran Siva, corporate vice president, Strategic Market Development, AMD. “AMD EPYC 8004 Series CPUs are optimized for modern edge and vRAN deployment models to enable the telco industry’s current evolution toward truly end-to-end open, virtualized networks. We are extremely proud of our collaboration with Samsung and Vodafone, leveraging our latest data center processors to modernize legacy telco infrastructure and deliver the leadership Open RAN performance, efficiency and scalability needed to build highly innovative mobile networks.”
“As the telecom industry continues to rapidly evolve, Samsung and its ecosystem partners are at the forefront of innovation and transformation,” said Prakash Sangam, Founder & Principal of Tantra Analyst. “This technical achievement between Samsung, Vodafone and AMD validates the enhanced capabilities among all three companies’ solutions and supports new vendors in the expanding Open RAN ecosystem.”
The companies will demonstrate its test result exceeding 1Gbps throughput for multi UE on multi-cell configuration at MWC 2024.
