Samsung to conduct Australia’s first 5G vRAN trial on 26GHz with TPG Telecom

Samsung will also provide its latest 5G mmWave product, Compact Macro, which will be deployed in the wider Glebe area. The compact and lightweight solution brings together a baseband, radio and antenna in a single form factor.

Samsung said on Wednesday it has joined forces with TPG Telecom, a leading mobile network operator in Australia, to conduct the country's first 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN) trial with an integrated 26GHz mmWave solution to introduce the full power of 5G for mobile and fixed wireless services.

Commenting on this partnership, Woojune Kim, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics, said, "Samsung is excited to begin this trial with TPG Telecom powered by our innovative 5G vRAN solution and latest integrated 26GHz mmWave product, which will be the first in Australia."

For this trial, Samsung will place its industry-leading vRAN solution in TPG Telecom's brand new Innovation Lab in Glebe, NSW. The vRAN solution is built on the company's independently developed stack and runs on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

Samsung's 5G vRAN on mmWave which is already commercially deployed in global markets including Korea, Japan and the United States has the capacity to support multi-gigabit speeds, delivering IT technology efficiencies and deployment advantages while offering transformational 5G mobile experiences, the South Korean firm said in an official release.

Samsung will also provide its latest 5G mmWave product, Compact Macro, which will be deployed in the wider Glebe area. The compact and lightweight solution brings together a baseband, radio and antenna in a single form factor. It can be easily installed on the sides of buildings, as well as on utility poles, for the swift build-out of 5G networks.

We are very pleased to partner with Samsung as part of our new Innovation Lab to drive product and technology innovation by trialing virtualization. Deploying mmWave spectrum on our 5G network together with vRAN architecture will allow us to develop exciting 5G use cases for industry verticals and enable the delivery of even faster speeds and greater capacity for our customers.

Inaki Berroeta, CEO at TPG Telecom