Samsung has partnered with Liberty Puerto Rico to test the vendor's Open RAN virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) and radios in Liberty's mobile network in Puerto Rico.

As a result, Liberty is the first carrier in Puerto Rico and Latin America to introduce 5G vRAN and Open RAN technologies.

Samsung notes that the testing of the technology paves the way for Liberty to use less hardware equipment in the future.

At present, Liberty's 5G coverage reaches 97.5 percent of Puerto Rico's population.

The software-based vRAN provided by Samsung will help Liberty to virtualize the RAN processing and its functionalities in an elastic cloud environment. According to Samsung, this will boost performance, improve energy efficiency, and deliver a flexible architecture to introduce new technologies and services more quickly.

The purpose of vRAN is to virtualize RAN functionalities that have traditionally been performed on hardware. vRAN is tipped to support operators' RAN optimization, efficiency, and lower overall operational costs.

“The biggest advantage of vRAN and Open RAN is that it allows us to be more agile. By having the cell site information processing centralized in Liberty’s cloud-native data center and leveraging the latest software-centric solutions, the implementation, maintenance, and troubleshooting is a lot easier for operators to handle at a single location,” said Víctor Vera, senior director of RAN technology at Liberty. “This is especially valuable when it comes to recovery efforts during a natural disaster or emergency situations.”

“vRAN and Open RAN are cutting-edge technologies that are driving innovation in commercial networks and further bolstering 5G capabilities," added Carlos Alberto Aguilar Palafox, head of Samsung Networks Latin America.

"Samsung has long been a pioneer in the path towards next-generation networks. It’s an exciting step to introduce vRAN and Open RAN to Puerto Rico with Liberty and a meaningful collaboration that we hope to further build on in the future.”

Samsung said that tests so far have been successful and delivered "excellent results," without stating anything too specific, but did note that the tests have "validated the telco-grade performance and reliability of multi-vendor Open RAN technology, powered by Samsung’s vRAN solutions."

Earlier this year, Samsung partnered with German telco O2 Telefónica to deploy vRAN and Open RAN, at a site in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria.

Liberty is estimated to have more than one million mobile subscribers in Puerto Rico, plus one million TV subscribers.

In September, Liberty Latin America (LLA) completed the acquisition of spectrum assets from EchoStar in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.