SoftBank Develops 5G Layer 1 Software For Carrier-Grade VRAN On NVIDIA Grace Hopper Platform

(RTTNews) - SoftBank Corp. said it has developed 5G Layer 1 (L1) software, achieving carrier-grade high performance and quality virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) on the NVIDIA Grace Hopper platform.

SoftBank said it built the world's first outdoor testing environment that enables the baseband processing of 20 5G cells with a bandwidth of 100 MHz on a single server featuring the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture. The 4.9 GHz frequency band was used for this outdoor test and a maximum communication capacity of approximately 1.3 Gbps per cell through a maximum of 4-layer MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) was achieved.

The high-speed processing capabilities of NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform are highly compatible with high-frequency bands that can be allocated to a wide frequency bandwidth per cell, and these capabilities are expected to be applied to future 6G applications such as centimeter waves.

In a separate press release, NVIDIA confirmed that SoftBank, using the NVIDIA AI Aerial accelerated computing platform, has successfully piloted the world's first combined AI and 5G telecom network — a breakthrough in computing that opens AI revenue streams potentially worth billions of dollars to telecom operators.