Samsung fills its 2G hole in new challenge to Ericsson and Nokia

“If you can make gigabit speeds through software on vRAN, how difficult can 2G be?” said Woojune Kim, Samsung’s global head of sales, when confronted at this year’s Mobile World Congress with the 2G hole in its product portfolio. Three months since then, “not that difficult” seems to be the answer, although the virtualized 2G product it announced today will have been in the works for much longer – possibly since Vodafone first began highlighting the South Korean company’s attractions as a radio access network vendor in late 2019.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the lack of a 2G offer has been problematic for Samsung. Used for basic voice communications, global roaming and older machine-to-machine connections, the ageing mobile technology demands continuing support in its dotage, even as operators focus on rolling out 5G and maintaining 4G systems. In Belgium, Orange this month said 2G will be around until 2028. The UK government’s timeline for a shutdown is 2033.

“You need a fallback for telephones and emergency calling and so the operators are saying we still need it, and Samsung has come round,” said Gabriel Brown, a principal analyst with Heavy Reading.

Before today’s news, prospective Samsung customers feared having to maintain parallel networks from different vendors – a Samsung-delivered 4G and 5G one alongside an older 2G platform. That would have been costly and complex. Samsung, moreover, would have balked at developing a separate 2G product based on the old-school approach.

“Virtualization makes it much more attractive for them,” said Brown. “If they had to develop and maintain a 2G system for the long term as a discrete system, that would have been pretty unattractive. Costs would be high, and they might not have the right IPR [intellectual property rights]. With demand, there is not going to be a huge amount of money in it.”

The virtual single RAN

The virtualization of the technology essentially means that Samsung’s baseband software can be deployed on common, off-the-shelf equipment featuring general-purpose processors (a Dell or HPE server, say, incorporating an x86 chip from Intel or AMD). The 2G software, importantly, can run on the same server that supports 4G and 5G.

“It is like a virtual single RAN, in a way,” said Brown. “There is no dedicated 2G device at all, which makes it much more efficient from an operations point of view.”

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.