Samsung and Orange Group are scaling up their virtualized and Open RAN deployment across Europe, moving from pilots to production after three years of testing. The expanded partnership centers on Samsung's AI-powered vRAN running on Intel's latest Xeon 6 processors, a setup that Orange says delivers performance matching or beating traditional network infrastructure while cutting power consumption and enabling edge AI applications on the same hardware handling voice and data traffic.
Samsung just notched a major win in the race to virtualize telecom infrastructure. The company's expanding its partnership with Orange Group, one of Europe's largest carriers, to deploy AI-powered virtualized RAN technology across more sites in 2026. It's a validation that software-defined networks can finally match the reliability telcos demand.
The move marks a shift from pilot to production. Samsung and Orange have been testing vRAN and Open RAN since 2023, and according to Samsung's announcement, the results convinced Orange that virtualized infrastructure delivers "performance maturity and operational effectiveness comparable to or better than those of traditional RAN solutions." That's telecom speak for: it actually works.
What makes this deployment different is the hardware underneath. Samsung's running its vRAN software on Intel's Xeon 6 system-on-a-chip, packed into a single commercial off-the-shelf server from Dell with a cloud platform from Wind River. The setup marks a departure from the specialized, expensive gear that's dominated telecom infrastructure for decades.
The single-server approach isn't just about cost savings. Orange can now handle high-capacity network loads on one box with a smaller physical footprint and lower power consumption than traditional setups. But here's where it gets interesting: Orange can redirect unused computing capacity on that same server to run AI and edge applications. It's infrastructure multitasking, turning cell towers into distributed compute nodes.
