Vodafone deployed the U.K.’s first 5G Open RAN site in Bath, Somerset in January 2022
Vodafone Group this week said it will introduce Open RAN in Italy through a pilot program. The carrier completed a series of 4G calls over a cluster of shared commercial network sites in Romania in partnership with Orange.
The pilot will utilize Nokia’s containerized baseband software and will run Red Hat OpenShift. It will be hosted on the latest generation Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers, which support a smart Network Interface Card (NIC) for Layer 1 processing developed by Nokia and Marvell.
“Today’s announcement reinforces Vodafone’s commitment to supporting the EU digital economy with the deployment of customer-focused Open RAN networks,” commented Alberto Ripepi, chief network officer at Vodafone. “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.”
On the Nokia side of things, the vendor’s Head of Radio Access Networks Mark Atkinson said the company is “committed to providing more choice and a higher performance in Open RAN solutions.”
According to the carrier, the latest pilot represents a further step towards its goal of having 30% of its masts based on Open RAN by 2030, a plan that Vodafone Group Chief Technology Officer Johan Wibergh announced during a speed at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022 in Barcelona. At the time, he said that approximately 30,000 sites across Europe will eventually use OpenRAN, with rural areas the first to benefit.
A month prior to Wibergh’s speech, Vodafone deployed the U.K.’s first 5G Open RAN site in Bath, Somerset, followed by additional rural deployments. Then, at the end of the same year, the carrier announced its first urban Open RAN deployment with 16 masts in Exmouth and Torquay, England.
In related news, Vodafone also worked with Samsung and Orange on the first 4G calls over shared commercial networks based on Open RAN in Romania. The pilot project, the completion of which was also announced this week, used Samsung’s virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) solutions and its multi-RAT vRAN software and Open RAN-compliant radios. As part of their pilot project, the operators achieved successful 4G calls over their respective Open RAN sharing sites and will next introduce 2G, followed by 5G, said Samsung.
