Verizon says that it has already deployed more than 130,000 Open RAN-capable radios in its network as part of an ongoing modernization project in which the carrier is putting in place a virtualized Radio Access Network architecture as a “precursor” to Open RAN.
That 130,000 figure includes massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radios, part of a previous Verizon announcement that it was putting in 15,000 virtualized cell sites with O-RAN-compliant baseband units. The carrier announced in 2019 that it was putting a cloud-native, containerized core in place, and in 2020 it said that it had achieved fully virtualized baseband functions in the RAN. Since then, Verizon says, it has been “aggressively deploying that solution throughout the network.”
