Major multinational European carriers have publicly and repeatedly expressed intent to deploy Open RAN at scale. This is driven by a number of factors chief among them the need to comply with national-level regulations concerning the replacement of equipment from Chinese vendors, as well as the desire to create a more competitive vendor ecosystem with the economic benefits that brings. So given the commitment, given the target scale and given mounting cost pressures, why’s it taking so long?
RCR Wireless News posed this question to Dell’Oro Group’s Stefan Pongratz earlier in the year. He noted, “Open RAN means different things to different people. Some of the early adopters might have focused on just one part of the movement. But the European operators want to incorporate more aspects of the broader Open RAN vision from the start…This, taken together with product refresh timing, is playing a role…So in many regards I think it is less about the state of Open RAN and more about the status of the broader technology readiness across the entire RAN portfolio.”
Around the recent Fyuz event in Madrid, hosted by the Telecom Infra Project, Vodafone put out a number of Open RAN-related announcements that seem to validate Pongratz’s point. While a narrow definition of Open RAN might be focused on disaggregating hardware from software and proving out multi-vendor interoperability, a more full vision would include advancements in silicon, particularly for L1 processing for advanced radio arrays, more robust automated service management and orchestration capabilities, and even use cases like RAN sharing.
That’s not to say Vodafone hasn’t been busy deploying Open RAN sites; quite the opposite in fact. Vodafone UK turned on its first 4G Open RAN site in August 2020 at the Royal Welsh Showground in Polys, Wales. Voda’s first Open RAN 5G site came online in January 2022, then in December 2022 activation of more sites in more urban areas got underway. In August this year, the operator announced plans to deploy 2,500 similar sites by 2027 using technology and services from vendors Capgemini, Dell Technologies, Intel, Keysight, Samsung Networks and Wind River.
Speaking at RCR’s Open RAN Global Forum, Vodafone’s Head of Open RAN Paco Martin, “I think we are…exactly at the very, very key moment where we need to prove that after we disaggregated everything, we can aggregate it back again. And I would say there are two main challenges.” The first is achieving the right quality of radio performance at the right cost.
“You need to also do that across multiple suppliers,” he said. “Because it’s not just one simple configuration, you need to be able to offer to the market multiple solutions that eventually are interoperable as well. And apart from being able to deliver the quality once and to do it later with multiple suppliers, you need to be able to do it efficiently. So that will be the second point, to be able to do it efficiently…We are at the right step now proving that Open RAN can work, but now the challenge is running the interoperability in the right way.”
Which brings us back to Vodafone’s more recent announcement as the company moves into a tender process covering its entire 170,000-site footprint with a goal of 30% Open RAN.
Vodafone strengthening work with Arm and Intel on Open RAN silicon
In its announcement, Vodafone made the point that it’s working with both Arm-based and x86-based Open RAN silicon vendors to foster competition and innovation in that part of the ecosystem. Specifically, Vodafone is working with SynaXG and Ampere “to test and validate Arm-based Open RAN silicon, as well as Fujitsu which will provide the RAN software.” Testing is set to start this year in vendor labs, and will then move to Vodafone’s own R&D facilites in Malaga, Spain, and Newbury, United Kingdom. And, as announced at Fyuz, Intel will start providing Vodafone with sample silicon in an effort to accelerate time-to-market.
Vodafone’s Director of Network Architecture Santiago Tenorio said in a statement that “Open RAN leadership coupled with the power efficiency of the Arm-based architecture, will widen the chip and software ecosystem. By expanding the number of competing best-in-class suppliers, we can drive greater innovation, energy efficiency and security for the benefit of our customers.”
Open RAN automation and orchestration
The move to Open RAN also tracks with the move to cloud-native 5G networks which is anchored around leveraging new types of data flows with distributed cloud processing to support automation with use cases ranging from spectral efficiency and SLA management to on-demand service delivery and even energy efficiency.
On that note, Vodafone is working with NTT DoCoMo, an early mover in virtualized and Open RAN who is also selling its approach to other carriers via its OREX initiative, on enhancing standardization of “interfaces between existing parts of the network and” new SMO platforms that conform to O-RAN Alliance specifications. The duo published a paper on this topic.
According to Vodafone: “Automation will remove many of the existing manual processes associated with single supplier sites, making it easier to build and maintain software-dependent 5G networks using AI and machine learning techniques.” The carrier calls out benefits, “including automatically extending 5G coverage faster, and remotely turning off unused mobile cells to save energy.”
Open RAN pilots in Italy and Romania
Again speaking to an interest in Open RAN deployments that bring in broad feature sets, Vodafone is working in Italy with Nokia on a wide-ranging 5G Open RAN pilot meant to prove out API-based network and platform access for independent software vendors and running Nokia baseband software on Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud application platform. In addition to Nokia and Red Hat, the trial is using Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers which is meant to serve both the radio network and provide edge computing capabilities. The servers sport a Smart NIC for L1 processing that was co-developed by Nokia and Marvell.
Vodafone Chief Network Officer Alberto Ripepi said in a statement that the big picture is around “supporting the EU digital economy with the deployment of customer-focused Open RAN networks. Through greater collaboration, Vodafone and Nokia will also foster a new developer ecosystem in our home markets by providing a live software-based open network on which to launch innovative products and services for our customers.”
In Romania, Vodafone is working with Orange to pilot 4G calling in a rural commercial site cluster where the two operators share network infrastructure. This follows on an earlier announcement that the two operators would partner to use OPen RAN to extend rural coverage in Europe.
To the RAN sharing point, the idea is that each operator can independently deploy and manage virtualized radio software while sharing a cloud infrastructure. Publicly announced vendors for the pilot include Samsung, Wind River and Dell. Next steps are to move on from 4G, then to 2G, then to 5G.
Again from Ripepi: “Alongside Orange we have developed a model which will serve as a blueprint to extend mobile networks to rural communities across Europe. Open RAN sharing will allow us to reduce costs by sharing hardware components while independently managing our own RAN software in the cloud to be able to offer differentiated services to our respective customers.”
