Per a new agreement, Samsung is supplying Dish Wireless with an initial shipment of 24,000 Open RAN-compliant radios and 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN) software solutions to help the operator accelerate its network deployment in the U.S. The Dish network is a greenfield, nationwide 5G network architected using cloud-native and Open RAN principles, with Kubernetes-based management at its heart.
The announcement is considered an expansion of the multi-year 5G Open RAN deal that the pair revealed last May, in which Samsung provided its comprehensive portfolio of 5G solutions, including its virtualized distributed unit (vDU), virtualized central unit (vCU) and Open RAN-compliant 5G radios. Samsung also built new dual-band and tri-band Open RAN-compliant radios specific for this deployment.
