Canadian company Telus confirmed it's working with Samsung Electronics to build a commercial Open RAN network.

The pair claim it will be a first in Canada, and is part of a move to expand on existing brownfield deployments.

Telus chose Samsung as its 5G vendor partner back in June 2020.

The company, which also has 5G contracts with Ericsson and Nokia, had worked with Huawei before Canada's clampdown on the Chinese vendor.

Telus and Samsung will deploy the Open RAN network on existing infrastructure, with the use of a virtualized radio access network (vRAN), which allows the use of software instead of hardware.

Open RAN promotes a new breed of telecoms kit that allows providers to ‘mix and match’ solutions from multiple vendors, which is impossible with proprietary network equipment.

Telcos are expected to invest more than $30 billion in Open RAN by the end of the decade.

Commercial deployment will begin in the first half of this year and a large-scale network rollout is expected to begin midway through this year, said Telus.

Both companies have trialed vRAN and Open RAN in select Canadian markets.

According to Telus, Samsung will provide its 64T64R Massive MIMO radios, as well as support for third-party radio integration.

Telus' deployment will be supported by Wind River and HPE. Wind River will provide its cloud infrastructure and distributed Edge platforms, while HPE will provide servers equipped with fourth-generation Intel processors and vRAN Boost optimized for Open RAN.

Samsung has a track record with Open RAN. Earlier this week the vendor, along with Vodafone and AMD conducted a phone call using AMD’s new general-purpose processor on an Open RAN platform.

Last year the company supported Dish Wireless' virtualized RAN (vRAN) 5G network launch.