To the external observer perhaps most of the recent noise around Mavenir has focussed on its efforts to increase innovation and vendor diversity in the radio access network by pushing for the adoption of Open RAN. Despite success in driving the Open RAN agenda and scoring some high-profile customer wins, it is no secret that Open RAN investments are yet to pick-up at scale.
So, it might come as a surprise to some outsiders that, as the company heads into Mobile World Congress and the rest of 2025, it has just closed its second best ever sales year in its 20-year history and says it is well set to drive future performance.
INNOVATIVE & CLOUD-NATIVE
A key reason for that positivity is that the company has a wide portfolio across the whole telecoms stack, from packet core and cloud-native IMS software, to billing, charging, and security software solutions. Mavenir provides mission-critical services to a massive user base, supporting voice services for over 400 million subscribers, messaging for more than 3.5 billion subscribers, and data services for over 100 million subscribers. These numbers demonstrate Mavenir’s significant presence and influence in the global telecoms market. Importantly, as President and CEO Pardeep Kohli explains, in each of those areas it has designed its products to be deployable as software in a multi-cloud environment.
Mavenir is proud of its history of being the first to introduce many new applications: working with leading US and European operators, Mavenir was the first to bring in VoLTE, Vo Wi-fi and RCS.
“We’re the only company which, from the beginning, provided a disaggregated model – separating software from hardware – enabling cloud-native deployment in a private or public cloud,” Kohli says.
Bejoy Pankajakshan, Chief Technology & Strategy Office, explains that this ability gives Mavenir’s customers the ongoing opportunity to leverage cloud hyperscalers’ investment in performance and technology, such as new chip platforms.
“As the operators make those cloud transformations, we’ve got the potential as a disaggregated player to plug into whatever CaaS or hyperscale environment they want to deploy in.”
Mavenir’s cloud-native solutions, and the benefits they can drive for customers, will be a key pillar of its demonstrations at MWC.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
A second area of focus for Mavenir is its drive to bring more energy efficiency to telco networks.
In some use cases, this is a result of Mavenir’s knowledge of how to design and run the most efficient cloud network instances.
Pankajakshan points to Mavenir’s collaboration with Deutsche Telekom operator in Germany that has resulted in a cloud core network deployment, which will be showcased at MWC through a video demonstration. A key highlight of this solution is the implementation of a SmartNIC offload for the User Plane Function (UPF). This innovative approach, which leverages NVIDIA SmartNICs, has earned recognition for its efficiency. By offloading the UPF, operators can achieve the same throughput while reducing power consumption by half. This results in significant energy and cost savings, with CPU usage decreased by 53%.
“Rather than processing every packet on the CPU, we’re offloading the packet handling to the NIC.”
Another use case that will be showcased at MWC will be exploiting Power Management features from chip partners Intel and AMD.
“When you’re not using the CPU to process user data you can put it to sleep, and that allows you to reduce energy usage and the footprint,” Pankajakshan says.
A third area of endeavour in energy efficiency is the work Mavenir is doing to reduce energy usage of its Radio Units. Vodafone certified that Mavenir’s massive MIMO antennas were less power consuming that competitor products, and Mavenir has been engaging in key research to drive further efficiencies. These include the potential use of new materials for Power Amplifiers such as Gallium Oxide and Aluminium Oxide.
It also includes enabling new green software features. As part of this, the company is driving innovation in a RAN control element known as the RIC. Here, its algorithms can intelligently steer traffic to reduce energy usage within networks, where typically 80% of usage is handled by just 20% of sites.
What we are working on now is to make use of all the AI tools that are becoming available, and evolve the network so that it can align with the advancements which are happening in that space
AI NATIVE IN THE OPERATIONAL BLOODSTREAM
According to Kohli, what has driven all Mavenir’s investment into the cloud-native portfolio, its new radio products and its focus on green technology is the company’s innovation mindset. That mindset means it is now ready for AI opportunities.
“We have everything we need to run on cloud,” Kohli says, “What we are working on now is to make use of all the AI tools that are becoming available, and evolve the network so that it can align with the advancements which are happening in that space”
Pankajakshan sums up Mavenir’s capabilities within AI in 3 ways.
- The first is to use AI to make Network Functions more intelligent, so they can operate within the network more effectively. For example, in most networks, monitoring and service assurance is carried out using tooling products that receive and analyse trace data from the Network Functions and infrastructure. This requires large server capacity – sometimes double that required by the network functions being monitored.
“Now we can solve that issue by doing things more intelligently, using AI within the Network Functions themselves. That reduces the footprint required for the tooling companies and eventually will mean operators will not need to deploy as much tooling,” he says. Mavenir has already co-operated in trials with Nvidia to use its GPU-based microservice inferencing for Root Cause Analysis within the network.
- A second area of implementation is using AI for network operations. Mavenir has a RIC (Radio Intelligent Controller) implementation for a large Indian operator. This is operating an AI process in a closed loop automation to handle device mobility parameters within the network.
This Mobility Robustness Optimisation has resulted in up to 50% improvement in how the network handles mobile handovers. That followed a six-month process in which the application moved from being an open optimisation, with human intervention in the loop and deployed within maintenance windows, to being a fully closed loop optimisation that runs full time.
With the pace at which things can change, this next four or five years are going to be amazing. You could design the whole system in a different way using an AI-native Core. It changes the whole way of doing things, and that’s where the opportunity lies.
For Brandon Larson, SVP Cloud Platform & AI, this implementation is a good illustration of how Mavenir is getting AI into the “operational bloodstream” of its customers.
“We’re able to do this because of the way we work. It mirrors the way we combined our cloud expertise with our telco domain knowledge to work with our customers, as we did on T-Mobile’s Magenta Cloud Platform.
“It’s the same now we are driving AI and data science into day-to-day telco operations. We put it in billing and charging, security, network functions, and our analysts use AI to develop solutions across the RAN and Core.”
Importantly for Larson, this is always done in conjunction with telco domain experts.
“We built our own Deep Q-Network (DQN) reinforcement learning models, using neural networks to model system behaviour. But these are not generic – we created our own specific architecture, understood data collection and context and engineered solutions for specific telco use cases.
“We’re looking at problem statements, whether it be in fraud and security, RAN operations, or capacity modelling for IMS, and then we work our way back to the AI, with telco domain experts working with the data science to solve a very specific problem. That’s a very practical way to solve this problem within telco constraints, so we’re not just starting by throwing GPUs and horsepower at it.”
For Larson, the way in which Mavenir aligns its AI and data science knowledge with the skillset requirements of its customers is critical.
“One thing we remind customers is not just to focus on their investments but on the partnerships they choose, so that they work with vendors and ecosystem partners that share their vision.”
- The third is to use AI to monetise Core networks. Mavenir is transforming enterprise monetisation with its cutting-edge IMS Voice AI solutions. By harnessing native device capabilities, these solutions eliminate the need for downloadable OTT applications, providing a seamless user experience.
Mavenir’s innovative use cases in the voice core include call summarisation for efficient follow-up, voice biometrics for secure authentication, call classification and prioritisation for optimised call handling, and integration with scheduling tools for streamlined operations. By leveraging existing IMS infrastructure, Mobile Operators can unlock new revenue streams, enhance productivity, and deliver advanced voice-driven services without disruption.
Discussing Mavenir’s vision for incorporating AI in the core network for future 6G and long-term applications, Pankajakshan emphasises the need to revolutionise telco architecture, shifting away from traditional, rigidly defined network functions.
Instead, Pankajakshan envisions an AI-native core that can adapt and support a wide range of future services, including Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), connected cars, and robots. This future-proof architecture will rely on AI-generated code that can self-learn, heal, and adapt using AI-learned state machines.
THE AI FUTURE
For CEO Kohli, the company’s innovation and capabilities in data science and AI offer up tangible opportunities for telcos to build a more efficient and flexible future.
“With the pace at which things can change, this next four or five years are going to be amazing. You could design the whole system in a different way using an AI-native Core. It changes the whole way of doing things, and that’s where the opportunity lies.”
* This is a sponsored article.
