By Catherine Sbeglia Nin
Dish Network has selected Samsung to provide its 5G Open RAN-compliant virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions and radio units across its US markets. The Samsung radios — some of which will be Massive MIMO radios — will also support all of Dish’s Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) spectrum bands — n71, n29, n66, n70, n48 and n77.
Branded as the SMART 5G network, Dish’s wireless network is a greenfield, nationwide 5G network architected using cloud-native and Open RAN principles. According to Dish Wireless President and Chief Operating Officer John Swieringa, Samsung’s solutions will play “an integral role” in the network’s expansion by delivering flexibility via “software-based solutions that support advanced services and operational scalability.”
“We look forward to working with Samsung, whose industry leadership in vRAN and O-RAN innovation will help support our vision of delivering open, interoperable cloud-based 5G services to consumers and enterprises across the US,” he continued.
In addition, Samsung will provide Dish with 5G end-user devices. Currently, the carrier is testing its 5G network using the Samsung Galaxy S22, and said it plans to continue using the vendor’s phones as a reference platform throughout the network deployment process.
“Together, we’ll create solutions to bring Dish Wireless’ smart network to life for retail and enterprise customers, enhancing their productivity, enriching their connection to people and smart technology, improving their business operations and giving our customers control over their 5G services,” said Stephen Bye, EVP and chief commercial officer of Dish Wireless.
Samsung’s Executive Vice President and Head of the Networks Business Mark Louison said the company is excited to join Dish’s 5G journey, calling the “a pioneer” that is “leveraging openness and virtualization that sit at the heart of network evolution.”
“Our advanced 5G vRAN and radio solutions bring telco-grade quality and cloud-based agility together, building on these benefits to enable more customers to experience the full value of commercial 5G Open RAN,” he added.
Samsung is not Dish’s first vRAN provider; in 2020, the company selected Intel to supply vRAN equipment for its 5G network in a deal that included the Intel Xeon Scalable processor, the Intel Ethernet 800 Series network adapter, the Intel vRAN Dedicated Accelerator ACC100 and Intel FlexRAN software reference architecture. The collaboration enabled Dish to consolidate and optimize multiple workloads at locations across its network for increased efficiency, the companies said.
