Mavenir powers Deutsche Telekom’s 5G standalone core

Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Mavenir on announced the successful delivery and deployment of Mavenir’s cloud-native 5G core for Deutsche Telekom in Germany.

Specifically, Deutsche Telekom selected Mavenir as the supplier for software applications to run on its defined hardware and the existing Kubernetes-based platform of its German business, ensuring an open architecture approach.

The move is not exactly coming out of the blue when considering Mavenir’s past experience with DT.

Mavenir has been at the forefront of the open Radio Access Network (RAN) movement, as has DT. But this marks the first deployment completed in Germany since Mavenir was selected as one of the preferred Converged Packet Core vendors for Deutsche Telekom Group. The German operator also uses Mavenir’s IMS solution in its network. 

As part of the deployment process, the Converged Packet Core was integrated with Deutsch Telekom’s existing multi-vendor access network and other system components.

DT is dealing with a new 5G SA core and an existing 4G/5G core; both will converge in the future, explained Stephan Broszio of DT’s Corporate Communications department.

For the time being, Ericsson is DT’s main partner in the 4G/5G core network. In 2019, DT decided to phase out Chinese vendors, namely Huawei. For the new 5G SA core, Mavenir comes in and as DT is pursuing a multi-vendor strategy, this means the new 5G SA core is built together with other U.S. and European partners as well, Broszio said.