Japan’s KDDI has turned on its first commercial 5G Standalone (SA) Open RAN site using virtualized RAN equipment from Samsung and Massive MIMO radios from Fujitsu. The operator claims this to be first commercial deployment of 5G SA using fully Open RAN-compliant equipment from more than one vendor. The die was cast in December 2020 when Fujitsu announced its Open RAN-compatible 5G radio unit had been selected by KDDI for 5G SA commercial services in Japan, then scheduled for launch in the second half of KDDI’s 2021 financial year, ending on March 31 2022. Samsung has provided the equipment conforming to Open RAN standards for disaggregating the RAN so that different vendors’ equipment can be mixed and matched. The site…