US telco AT&T and Ericsson have completed a cloud RAN call.

The call was carried out using Ericsson's cloud technology over AT&T's commercial 5G network.

According to AT&T, it now has commercial traffic flowing on cloud RAN sites, the first of which is located south of Dallas, Texas.

"This is the next milestone in AT&T’s Open RAN journey," said Chris Sambar, head of network at AT&T.

"By moving traffic to cloud RAN sites, we’re accelerating our C-Band deployment and continuing to virtualize our network. The open network future is coming fast and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovation that it brings for our customers.”

In December 2023, Ericsson was awarded a five-year contract worth $14 billion by AT&T to build the telco's Open RAN network. It saw off competition from rival vendor Nokia to seal the deal.

At the time, AT&T said it anticipates 70 percent of its mobile network traffic will flow across Open RAN platforms by late 2026.

From this year, the operator expects to have fully integrated Open RAN sites operating in coordination with Ericsson and Fujitsu.

By the start of 2025, AT&T said it will expand its Open RAN rollout with multiple suppliers including Corning Incorporated, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Intel.

As part of the recent Cloud RAN, AT&T and Ericsson have migrated one frequency band 3,700MHz for their C-Band traffic to Cloud RAN infrastructure.

The company confirmed to DCD that more trials will take place in the Dallas area.