Nokia and SK Telecom have conducted a proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstration in South Korea of a 5G virtualized RAN with 64T64R Massive MIMO. This gives them an early stake in the ground ahead of more such demonstrations over the rest of 2022, as well as early deployments. The PoC adopted the increasingly common architecture for vRAN trials, as popularized by the O-RAN Alliance, with the shared baseband infrastructure split into a virtual centralized unit (vCU) in the data center, and a virtual distributed unit (vDU) close to the cell site. This aims to maximize flexibility and resource efficiency and support 5G use cases that require advanced beamforming and/or ultra-low latency, among the capabilities that require a dedicated and optimized DU. The…