Tantra Analyst

Four long years after its debut, Qualcomm 5G Open RAN platforms witnessed a major launch last week in Vietnam with the state carrier Viettel. 

Viettel, which is both an operator and infrastructure vendor, announced an initial deployment of 300 sites, including the capital, Hanoi, in early 2025 and the potential for thousands more in the future. Viettel uses Qualcomm QRU100 RU and X100 DU platforms and Edgewise multi-vendor Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) solution for the deployment.

The announcement is even more significant, considering Viettel has services in many Asian, African and Caribbean countries where 5G is yet to be deployed, offering Qualcomm and Open RAN a huge business expansion opportunity.

Viettel is also a vendor

Unlike most cellular operators, Viettel, Vietnam’s largest operator, is not only a service provider but also a vendor. It designs and manufactures its own 5G gear from core network to RAN. This is crucial for a cost-sensitive market like Vietnam and many others it serves. RAN is one of the most difficult technologies to master, and 5G and Open RAN are the most complex. But Viettel has cracked the code with a long and deep collaboration with Qualcomm.

As an operator, Viettel is spreading its bets and deploying 5G networks from Ericsson and Nokia. But, notably, unlike Qualcomm, these will utilize legacy architecture, not the latest Open RAN. Viettel network will need thousands of 5G base stations to provide adequate country-wide coverage. It would be safe to assume that the deployment will be divided roughly equally between the three vendors.

Viettel and Qualcomm’s longstanding collaboration

Viettel and Qualcomm have been working on this for many years. Their first public statement about collaboration was in 2022 when they revealed that Viettel was developing its own infrastructure products using Qualcomm’s 5G Open RAN platforms. In 2023, during the Mobile World Congress show, they reported that they jointly developed 5G Radio Units and Distribution Units (DU). Finally, this month, they announced the first large-scale deployment of the commercial network.

Viettel has developed the state-of-the-art 32T32R massive MIMO RUs based on the Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN platform and DUs based on the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card. Both these products are fully compliant with O-RAN Alliance specifications, which means they can work with other vendors’ spec-complaint RUs and DUs. However, currently, it’s a single-vendor deployment, just like most other initial commercial deployments of Open RAN.

There has been an intense debate on the architecture to be used for Open RAN DU, specifically, the Layer-1 protocol, aka High-Phy, which includes the most demanding, highly latency-sensitive functions. The choice is between offloading these to a dedicated, purpose-built, in-line accelerator card or running them on the general-purpose host CPU with a look-aside accelerator. Qualcomm is a strong proponent of the former. Viettel’s choice of Qualcomm makes its preference clear as well. Obviously, proponents of in-line accelerators assert that it is the most cost- and power-efficient option. However, many vendors and operators have opted for look-aside architecture. So, the jury is still out on that.

The adoption of Qualcomm’s Edgewise management platform is also an interesting decision. Since it already supports multiple vendors, it is easy to assume that Edgewise will become an integral part of Viettel’s suite across the network, not just its own gear. 

Viettel’s development of a full 5G RAN from scratch in such a short span is a testament to its caliber and the advantages of virtualized Open RAN architecture. In this architecture, software and hardware are aggregated, allowing multiple parties to develop them. Qualcomm’s crucial role in making this happen goes without saying.

Some might say it took quite a long time for Qualcomm to have a commercial deployment. Considering that it takes years, even for vendors who have been in the business for decades, Qualcomm is not late. Additionally, understanding what the future holds for the company in this business is even more critical, especially when Open RAN seems to be losing steam, according to Dell’Oro.

Looking to the future

Open RAN seems to have missed the bus for the first phase of 5G. The deployments in most of the major markets have been completed using legacy architecture. There is still uncertainty about when the next phase of 5G expansion will come and how big it will be. However, the biggest opportunity for Open RAN will be in the regions where 5G is not yet deployed. This includes significant portions of Asia (except China, India, Japan, and Korea), most of Africa, and many parts of the Middle East. For many of these regions, 5G deployment is still very expensive. And that’s precisely the opportunity for Open RAN, Viettel, and Qualcomm.

For example, Viettel has properties in Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Haiti, Mozambique, Cameron, East Timor, Tanzania, Burundi and Myanmar. All of these markets require cost-effective 5G deployments. Their current option was to deploy legacy systems and be deprived of all the wonderful opportunities Open RAN offers now and, most importantly, in the future. But I am sure Viettel would like to take their own 5G Open RAN infrastructure to all these places and, of course, give a much wider footprint and validation and endorsement for Qualcomm 5G Open RAN platforms. We will see how that will turn out.