Virgin Media O2, the joint venture of European cable giant Liberty Global and Telefonica’s UK operations, has announced that it has selected network equipment vendor Mavenir, to supply its Open RAN gear. This appears to be an exclusive deal, and a chance for Mavenir to prove the concrete return on investment for customers. Mavenir will act as the primary integrator, and will specifically be providing its Open virtualized Radio Access Network (Open vRAN) portfolio. Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) says it has selected Mavenir to enable a more flexible and cloud-native architecture. To this end, Mavenir says its Open vRAN suite has been designed to be cloud-native, leveraging containerized microservices that can be deployed easily on any cloud platform. Specifically, Mavenir’s…