Field trials were jointly carried out on the sites—located in Tamworth and the Peak District, England—since the start of this year. This followed lab tests in October 2021 that validated the capability and performance of Samsung’s 4G and 5G solutions on Virgin Media O2’s commercial network.
The companies added that these field tests demonstrated interoperability between Virgin Media O2's 2G/3G/4G networks and Samsung’s latest 4G and 5G solutions, and validated use of Samsung’s Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) capabilities, should they be required.
Francis BJ Chun, president and CEO, Samsung UK, said, “Samsung is excited to extend our network collaboration with Virgin Media O2 in the UK, advancing from lab trials to now delivering 4G and 5G in commercial networks out in the field. We look forward to playing a major part of the diversification of the network equipment supply chain in the UK market.”
Jeanie York, chief technology officer at Virgin Media O2, added, “We are pleased to build on our previous collaboration with Samsung, delivering another 5G milestone in our push to developing Open RAN technologies. We will continue our collaborative efforts with Samsung to explore the possibilities of 5G and push the technology further to deliver superior end-user experiences for our customers.”
Samsung provided 4G radios, 5G Massive MIMO radios and baseband units, with the solutions covering a wide range of Virgin Media O2’s spectrum holdings, from low- to mid-band (800MHz, 2.1GHz and 3.5GHz).