Inside track: How Qualcomm Technologies helped Viettel score a big networking first with O-RANOpen RAN5G

Key Takeaways:

• Viettel's embrace of an open, flexible system enabled by O-RAN paves its way for global expansion.
• Viettel and Qualcomm Technologies treated the project as more of a strategic initiative than a standard network upgrade.
• Qualcomm Technologies' high performance and energy efficient chipsets powering Massive MIMO Radio Units and virtualized telephone company servers gives Viettel's O-RAN network a competitive advantage.

Meet Viettel

Viettel is a unique player because it both operates a wireless network for consumers and manufactures the equipment powering that service. The company was originally called Electronics and Information Equipment Corp., or Sigelco, when it was founded in 1989, but over the decades evolved into a global telecommunications giant with a parent company involved in everything from construction to consulting.

VHT sees digital transformation playing a pivotal role in its development strategy and believes it has a responsibility to bring technology - and the opportunities it creates - to its customers.

Beyond being the largest operator domestically in Vietnam, the company operates networks in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

It's with that eye toward further global expansion that piqued Viettel's interest in transition to an O-RAN network.

Expansion to O-RAN

Wireless carriers around the world are starting to embrace O-RAN in a big way because of the inherent advantages of the open system. O-RAN allows use of equipment from different vendors running on a common industry standard. The result is more flexibility and less need to rely on a single supplier. It also makes it easier for an operator to upgrade and expand their systems over time without ripping out and replacing older equipment.

In building out its 5G network, Viettel worked with major telecom equipment vendors Ericsson and Nokia for parts of its network. But it also wanted to take on the challenge of developing its own in-house O-RAN equipment, which is where Qualcomm Technologies entered the picture.

"When Qualcomm Technologies announced its plans to create 5G O-RAN chipsets, Viettel saw it as an opportunity to differentiate its 5G products and enhance its competitiveness," Hoang said. He also noted that Qualcomm Technologies' chipsets were highly regarded for their energy efficiency and superior performance.

Many of VHT's O-RAN telephone company servers (or virtualized distributed units) leverage inline acceleration with the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card to efficiently handle compute-intensive tasks, balancing high performance and low latency with efficient power usage, while reducing requirements on expensive CPU cores. This was critical to overcome performance and cost issues VHT faced from other O-RAN solutions using lookaside architecture (which requires the majority of L1 functions to be implemented in the CPU).

For their Massive MIMO Radio Units, VHT selected the Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN Platform, which enhances coverage, capacity and improves cell-edge data speeds, while also leveraging Qualcomm Technologies' power-efficiency expertise to maximize performance-per-watt. This ASIC-based O-RAN Radio Unit Platform provides significant power and cost savings compared to VHT's other O-RAN Radio Unit solutions (which are FPGA-based).

In addition to the hardware, the Qualcomm Edgewise Suite is integrated into the network, which allows Viettel to automate, manage and orchestrate the network to ensure efficient management of the 5G network at large.

"Qualcomm Technologies has been a pivotal collaborator in our journey toward 5G commercialization, making substantial contributions that accelerate our network deployment in Vietnam," VHT CEO Nguyen Vu Ha said in its announcement last month.

The Qualcomm Technologies edge

Qualcomm Technologies and Viettel already had an existing relationship, but the 2022 agreement to collaborate on O-RAN represented a step up in their efforts to work together.

Hoang said one of the advantages of the collaboration was having access to Qualcomm Technologies' latest chipset solution before commercial release, which he said gave VHT a competitive advantage when integrating it into the company's equipment.

He added that the work "transcended the typical supplier-customer relationship." It wasn't simply another network upgrade.

"Throughout this collaboration, VHT and Qualcomm Technologies treated the project as a strategic initiative, redesigning hardware and jointly resolving challenges to bring a competitive product to market," Hoang said.

Looking forward

After the initial launch last month, Viettel plans to deploy 300 O-RAN sites running on Qualcomm Technologies-based 5G Massive MIMO platforms throughout Vietnam by the end of the year with thousands more planned for 2025 and beyond.

Hoang said that working with a global leader like Qualcomm Technologies has helped enhance VHT's own brand presence internationally. He added that the deployment helped transform its image from purely a network operator to a telecommunications equipment researcher and manufacturer.

VHT plans to take advantage of that momentum and reputation boost and export its 5G equipment to international markets, such as India and the Middle East.

"This collaboration signifies Viettel's commitment to delivering high-quality, cost-effective services for telecommunications infrastructure in Vietnam and globally," Hoang said.

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