Samsung Networks last week revealed that it has actually signed a business agreement with Spark New Zealand which is New Zealand’s largest mobile carrier to participate in building Spark’s 5G network in 2020.

Samsung Networks will certainly give Spark with its latest 5G New Radio (NR) solutions, consisting of Massive MIMO radios that have a very slim design profile, are lightweight for simplicity of installment, and supply space savings on tower tops. This provides operators with more versatile, scalable 5G solutions that are easy and also cost-efficient to deploy, as well as accelerate commercial 5G availability. Since April 2019, Samsung’s Massive MIMO solutions has actually been commercially proven with across the country roll-outs led by all 3 mobile operators in Korea.

While likely best recognized for its leading smartphone business, Samsung continues to make a bigger name for itself. Samsung has actually been heavily involved with rollouts in early 5G countries like the UNITED STATE and South Korea, but has likewise scored success in Canada with Videotron, along with Japan.
In the UNITED STATE Samsung, alongside Nokia and Ericsson, is a 5G provider for significant operators including AT&T, Sprint and also Verizon.

Recently Samsung’s made a variety of network-related statements, consisting of a cooperation with Marvell for radio unit architectures; demoing 5G peak download speeds of 4.2 Gbps on Verizon’s live network in Texas; as well as signing a deal to provide LTE and 5G solutions to U.S. Cellular, the country’s fifth-largest carrier.

Samsung is one of the big believers in O-RAN

Samsung is one of the main believers  in open interfaces and is an active participant in the O-RAN alliance. In the UNITED STATE, for example, Samsung was picked in 2018 as a 4G supplier to aid Verizon in its LTE Open RAN effort.

Alok Shah, Samsung Networks VP of Networks strategy said “As we move to these multi-vendor networks, operators will absolutely need more support from service vendors around system integration, around ensuring spec compliance for different interfaces”

Abroad, Shah said Samsung is noticing O-RAN interest from operators in Japan consisting of NTT Docomo, and also in Europe, pushed by operators like Vodafone and Orange. Last November, Vodafone called out Samsung’s capabilities in its response to the operator’s RFI for 5G that contained some conditions such as support for the O-RAN spec and multi-vendor environments.

Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone’s head of network strategy and architecture said ” There is one company that is particularly bright, and that is Samsung ” “Their level of compliance to our requirements is spectacular; it’s beyond 80%. That tells us that if we want to put 5G into open RAN and take it to suburban and urban areas, we are probably more ready than we thought.”

Other vendors that Samsung beat out was including companies like Mavenir, Parallel Wireless as well as Radisys.

Sbah explained also: “We have scale, we’re a pretty substantial player in the infrastructure market, but we’re a challenger and we’re very comfortable being a disruptor, So we’re in a position where we can offer operators financial strength and scale, and at the same time a willingness to help them improve the efficiency and flexibility of their networks in a way that maybe some of the incumbents aren’t as comfortable doing.”