Operator announces Open RAN trials in Italy, onboards Arm to collaborate on Open RAN silicon
At the Fyuz 2023 event in Madrid yesterday, Vodafone announced it would soon be issuing a request for quotation (RFQ) for its entire estate of 170,000 mobile sites, based on Open RAN specifications.
The announcement was made by Yago Tenorio at the event’s opening keynote. He is a Vodafone Fellow and Network Architecture Director with responsibilities across Europe and Africa. Tenorio also chairs the Telecom Infra project (TIP), organiser of the Fyuz event.
The announcement is not a big surprise as Vodafone’s current RAN deals expire in early 2025 and the RFQ process is not an overnight one. As set out previously, Vodafone is to take a phased approach to swapping out its RAN equipment for Open RAN-based systems. Its first goal is to have Open RAN deployed at about 30% of sites in the initial phase, with 2030 mentioned as the deadline.
Note that Vodafone does not intend to implement Open RAN everywhere – some sites will continue as single-vendor for economic reasons.
No similar action from other operators
The Open RAN market has become sluggish as operators have struggled to deal with rising costs, especially energy, in the wake of the pandemic. It is hoped that Vodafone’s RFQ will reignite the sector for new entrants as well as the old guard – Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia.
Yet despite lots of verbal enthusiasm among operators, MoUs and so on, Vodafone remains the only one ploughing ahead with large scale commercial deployment of Open RAN.
Ready in the UK
Vodafone is readying itself to roll out Open RAN in the UK at scale. It is being forced by the UK government to replace its extensive estate of Huawei RAN equipment on national security grounds. The operator has also said it will begin 5G Open RAN trials in Italy with Nokia, Red Hat, Dell and Marvell.
Progress with chips
Tenorio also highlighted Intel’s plans to produce sample silicon for Vodafone’s R&D facility at Málaga in Spain, in the Open RAN silicon labs which was announced in February.
Today Vodafone announced it will collaborate on a new Open RAN chipset with Arm. Vodafone is already working with specialist system and silicon firms SynaXG and Ampere Computing to test and validate Arm-based Open RAN silicon, as well as with Fujitsu which will provide the RAN software.
Testing will begin this year in vendors’ laboratories to prove the compute platform and silicon integration. It will be extended to include 5G commercial Open RAN software from Fujitsu before moving to Vodafone’s test facilities at its recently expanded R&D centre in Málaga, and Newbury, in the UK, in the first quarter of 2024. Vodafone said it expects more vendors to follow.
Tenorio commented, “Vodafone’s 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.”