Mavenir and Turkcell Partner on Open RAN

Istanbul, Turkey, and Richardson, TX – February 27, 2020. Mavenir, the industry’s leading end-to-end cloud-native network software provider for CSPs, has announced a business partnership with Turkcell, Turkey’s leading digital operator. The two companies, together, will test and deploy Open RAN vRAN within the Turkcell Group, initially in their home market, Turkey.

The partnership will start directly with fully containerized CU/DU and Open FH with Split 7.2 in trial and planned deployments, which will become a first in the industry. Virtual RAN solution will be deployed on Turkcell Telco Cloud and it will be the first workload that will be going live on Turkcell Edge Cloud.

Mavenir’s innovative, award-winning Open RAN vRAN solution centralizes baseband processing in cloud-native virtualized baseband units (vBBU) and exploits fronthaul over ethernet between vBBU and multiple remote radio units (RRU). The Mavenir vRAN architecture and platform can support 4G as well as both the NSA and SA implementations of 5G NR.

Mikael Rylander, SVP/GM Radio Access Products stated, “We are excited to be working with Turkcell, a thought leader for Open RAN, again proving that Open RAN solutions are a critical step in expanding the supply base and increasing security for future mobile networks.”

With open interfaces, the solution has the flexibility to support various deployment scenarios – including functional split 2 for enterprises and split 2 & 7 for macrocells. It can also support massive MIMO, edge microservices and network slicing for 5G NR.

Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell CTO stated, “At Turkcell, we have reached more than 60% virtualization in our mobile core network. We already take great advantage of what virtualization has to offer and are willing to extend the benefits of virtualization coupled with open RAN for the next step in Turkcell’s Radio Access Network evolution. With its broad experience and expertise in RAN technologies and Network Virtualization, Turkcell will make a great contribution to innovation on open vRAN towards the 5G era. We are excited to take on and lead this journey.”