AT&T* and Ericsson today announced they have deployed Ericsson Cloud RAN technology into AT&T's commercial 5G network.

The companies have now completed a Cloud RAN call, marking a milestone in the deployment of Open RAN. AT&T now has commercial traffic running on a Cloud RAN site, with the first Cloud RAN sites located in the Southern Dallas area of Texas.

The configuration used for the Cloud RAN call has been deployed in the AT&T network, and this configuration will be available for third-party vendors to use in the future for Open RAN.

"This is the next milestone in AT&T's Open RAN journey," said Chris Sambar, SVP of Network at AT&T. "By moving traffic to the Cloud RAN site, we are accelerating our C-band deployments and continuing to virtualize our network. The future of open networking is coming fast, and we look forward to seeing the innovation it brings for our customers."

Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks at Ericsson, said: "At Ericsson, we continuously innovate and leverage technology trends and shifts to stay ahead and enable the next leap – it's in our DNA. This progress in our collaboration with AT&T shows our commitment to supporting their Open RAN ambitions."

As part of the live deployment, AT&T and Ericsson have migrated one band of their C-band spectrum – 3700 MHz – to the Cloud RAN infrastructure. This is the next step in the ongoing collaboration between AT&T and Ericsson to realize the benefits of Cloud RAN and bring AT&T closer to its goal of an open, agile, and programmable wireless network.

Moving to Cloud RAN provides AT&T with the ability to deliver and secure data most cost-effectively while also creating an open environment for developers to create new applications and services.

AT&T and Ericsson will continue to implement and optimize new network functionality in this rapidly evolving area of cloud-native RAN architectures.