Turkcell is a converged telecommunication and technology services provider, founded and headquartered in Turkey, where mobile communication began when Turkcell commenced operations in February 1994, later signing a 25-year GSM license contract with the Ministry of Transportation on April 27, 1998. Since then, Turkcell has continuously increased the variety and quality of its services for mobile voice and data communication, and as a result, it is positioned as the leader of the Turkish telecommunications market. In Turkey, Turkcell has a nationwide 2G/3G/4.5G/NB-IoT network, where the latest LTE features such as 2-CA in UL, 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM have been activated to create a Gbps-4.5G network, with which it has been possible to offer a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) solution branded as “Superbox” even before deployment of 5G. Through the adoption of a self-organizing network (SON) software, for the development of which Turkcell actively contributes to, automatic management of the configuration and optimization of the network is achieved, allowing Turkcell to offer this kind of specialized services using Gbps speeds under strict SLAs. Within this context, Turkcell received the “Leading Contribution to SON Award” among the SON Deployment and Technical Innovation Awards at the 8th Annual SON World in 2017. Superbox and the rest of Turkcell’s high quality mobile and fixed services in Turkey are powered by backhaul networks consisting of fiber, microwave and satellite technologies. In the microwave domain, traditional band (6-42 GHz) and e-band (70/80 GHz) frequencies are employed using point-to-point links. Extending its reach beyond Turkey, thanks to its global footprint resulting from its subsidiaries and its diverse range of digital services that are also available abroad, Turkcell has subscribers from all over the world. The current vision of Turkcell is to become a digital operator, attaining global leadership in digital services. Turkcell Teknoloji, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Turkcell, is among Turkey’s leading R&D centres. It was set up in 2000, long before the digital operator vision was explicitly pronounced, to develop competitive information and communication technology (ICT) products, which underlie the digital services that are delivered globally. Today, the entity has a team of 800+ people, consisting of highly qualified researchers and engineers. The DRAGON project lies within the interest of the 5G R&D team of the Turkcell Group, which is a department of Turkcell Teknoloji that was formed to focus specifically on the research agenda of the operator in the domain of network technologies, and to explore evolution of 5G technologies and potential new use cases of 5G that will initiate additional developments on the set of specifications of the 5G network to be deployed by the operator.
Main tasks in the project
Turkcell acts a leader of WP6 “Field demonstrator”. Turkcell contributes in WP1 with Description of the scenarios and use cases, specification of the requirements in the backhaul from a network operator’s point of view by taking into account practical and economic feasibility of the solution. Turkcell is a leader “Exploitation” of WP7.
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