By Catherine Sbeglia Nin

Mavenir announced that it has expanded its European capabilities with the establishment of an Open RAN Centre of Excellence in Germany. The company said that the center, located in Bonn, will support European Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) with Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) engineering, planning, design, system integration and deployment.

“This latest Centre of Excellence further extends access to Mavenir’s Open RAN expertise across Europe and complements existing R&D design centres of excellence in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom,” commented senior VP and general manager of RAN business at Mavenir, Puneet Sethi.

Mavenir chose Germany as the center’s location partially due to the country’s strong support of and interest in Open RAN technologies. All German MNOs have committed to adopting Open RAN, Mavenir claimed in a press release. Further, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure has announced €300 million (US$344 million) in funding to develop and test Open RAN technology.

In 2019, Mavenir released its fully virtualized 4G/5G OpenRAN solution and earlier this year, launched a comprehensive OpenBeam portfolio of O-RAN compliant radio products, which provide MNOs with Open RAN solutions spanning micro, macro, millimeter wave (mmWave) and massive MIMO (mMIMO) use cases.

“Operators need alternatives to the traditional vendors, particularly in countries with restrictions,” the company’s President and CEO Pardeep Kohli has said previously, echoing others in the industry who view Open RAN as a critical step to lowering the barrier of entry for new RAN vendors, and in doing so, helping to achieve the new, innovative applications that 5G promises enable.